Urban film expresses the experience of living in the built world, in the city.

The spread of industrialism and the way this affects the movement of people and nature through the city is expressed in urban filmmaking. It has at its base an aesthetic derived from the industrial as opposed to the pastoral. It often in fact employs ironically the landscape filmmaker's approaches. For instance, Emily Richardson's Nocturne records the mysterious changes of light which transform nightime urban backstreets pointing up in the absence of daylight, the manmade aesthetic of the city.

Urban film also suggests something of the layering of experience in the city. An urban aesthetic has evolved which looks at beauty in alternative places and with the portability of the camera has concentrated on parts of the city caught in the side ways glances of alley ways, back doors and roof spaces. This is filmmaking about navigation and control and about uncovering the layering of meaning inscribed in the cityscape. Ian Bourn's Alfred Hitchcock for instance, brings the glamour of film down to earth as he tours the sites of Hitchcock's early locations in the back of a London taxicab.

Patrick Keiller's films London and Robinson in Space give us a disquieting close up of Britain's capital through the eyes of one of its dissidents. Keiller's eye for detail reveals over-looked aspects of the city during the last dark days of the Conservative government in the 1990s. With films such as Guerrillere Talks, London Suite and New York Conversations, Vivienne Dick creates a no less dystopian but affectionate portrait of urban living through the voices and lives of her friends. Nashashibi's portrait of the life of a Palestinian family shows us a different face of Nazareth in Hreash House, whilst Sutapa Biswas' camera in the double screen Remembrance of Things Past observes the crowded streets and traffic of Toronto, focusing on a bus of school children as they drive away.