When the filmmaker Andy Howlett first set out with his camera to document the final days of the Birmingham Brutalist Central Library in the area called Paradise Circus, little did he know the rabbit hole he was stumbling into. This is a story of the concrete colossus by the architect John Madin, which was decried by the Council as an eyesore on the one hand and hailed by the professional public as an exemplar of postwar Brutalism on the other, and the fight to save it. In this psychogeographic detective story, Andy Howlett weaves together archive footage with on-the-ground explorations in an attempt to figure out why we have lost our paradise and how to recover it.
In a collaboration with CAMP
