In 1949, Albert Camus landed in Porto Alegre and wrote in a letter a brief impression of the city: “A luz é bonita. A cidade, feia.” What does this observation reveal about the capital in the late 1940s? And what would he have to say about Porto Alegre today? How do the Lumière brothers’ films and the first footage shot in Rio Grande do Sul respond to the philosopher’s view? But, more importantly, how does the city itself respond to this sentence?