Santa Familia · A Tale of Two Barrios

Synopsis

Santa Familia is Conservatorio's last project inside Panama's Casco Antiguo: sixty apartments raised on the shell of a ruined school, right against a three hundred year old city wall. The film walks back through the twenty years of work that led there, told by the people who did it: Conservatorio's partners, the architect Hildegard Vásquez, the builders, the residents and the artists of the neighbourhood.

The title is the thesis of the project and of the film: this is not the story of a building but of two neighbourhoods meeting. Along the way come the demolition done by hand because no crane was allowed to rise above the cathedral tower, the site that broke ground into the pandemic, the courtyard redrawn from scratch to open it to the sea, and the programmes that hold up the rest: La Manzana, La Quince, and the five metre canvas Chingui painted for the first time in his life.