Subject: ADFF NY 2017 - 18 Film Programs

2017 - 9th Annual
Architecture & Design Film Festival:New York
18 Film Programs 
33 Films
10 Countries
5 Days 

All screenings at: 
Cinepolis Cinema in Chelsea 
260 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
Program 1  Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place 
Nov 1 @ 8:30 w/ Q&A  Purchase Tickets
Nov 5 @ 7:00  Purchase Tickets
Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place
Director: Catherine Hunter
2017 / 59 min / Australia


screening with:
the premiere of the winning short film from the People’s Choice Award from
American Institute of Architects’ I Look Up Film Challenge 2017

Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place explores the life and art of Australia’s most famous living architect. Murcutt’s extraordinary international reputation rests on the beauty and integrity of his work. With a swag of international awards (including the prestigious Pritzker Prize) Murcutt has literally put Australian architecture on the world map. And yet, by choice, he has never built outside his own country. Murcutt’s focus instead has been the creation of energy-efficient masterpieces perfectly suited to their environment, and his breakthrough designs have influenced architects around the world. This documentary follows Glenn Murcutt, now 80 years old, as he designs his most ambitious project to date—a mosque for an Islamic community in Melbourne.



Program 2  Building Hope: The Maggies's Centres
 
Nov 2 @ 7:15  Q&A with Director Purchase Tickets
Nov 5 @ 2:30 Q&A with Director and Architect Chris McVoy Purchase Tickets
Building Hope: The Maggies's Centres
Directed: Sarah Howitt
2016 / 59 min / UK – US Premiere


Screening with
Community by Design: Skid Row Housing Trust
Director: Myles Kramer
2017 / 4 min / USA

This fascinating story of Maggie's, a unique cancer charity, began life in Edinburgh in 1996. In 1993, Maggie Keswick Jencks was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was told she had three months to live. On hearing this devastating news she was left to sit on a plastic chair in a hospital corridor. The only place she could find to cry was a toilet cubicle. Her husband and co-founder Charles Jencks, said:

“I think that initial shock was certainly the moment when Maggie thought we can do better than this. You don’t have to suffer in a corridor on death row having just been told that you are going to die. That was the moment architecture and medicine met in our minds.”

In the the last year of her life, Maggie spent her time working on an idea for a cancer centre which she hoped would change the lives of other cancer sufferers. Since her death the most prominent names in architecture from Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and others have designed astonishing landmark buildings bearing her name.



Program 3  The Neue Nationalgalerie
Nov 2 @ 7:30 Q&A with Director Ina Weisse and Producer Felix von Boehm Purchase Tickets

Nov 4 @ 9:15 Purchase Tickets
The Neue Nationalgalerie
Director: Ina Weisse
2017 / 49 min / Germany – 
NY Premiere

Screening with
Starship Chicago
Director: Nathan Eddy
2017 / 16 min / USA

The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is an epoch-defining structure by the architect Mies van der Rohe. It was opened in 1968, shortly after his death. Nearly 50 years later, the director Ina Weisse sets out to examine the period during which this unique edifice was constructed. She is the daughter of the architect Rolf Weisse, who once worked in the offices of Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. In numerous interviews with her father and Mies van der Rohe's grandchild Dirk Lohan, along with the architect David Chipperfield – who is commissioned with renovating the building – and others, Ina Weisse explores the question of how the Neue Nationalgalerie came into existence, and what sort of World view is brought to expression by Mies van der Rohe's building.

Photo: Mies van der Rohe © Rolf Weisse



Program 4  The Diplomat, the Artist & the Suit
Nov 2 @ 9:45 Purchase Tickets
Nov 5 @ 4:45 Purchase Tickets
The Diplomat, the Artist & the Suit
Director: Paul Goldman
2016 / 57 min / Australia – US Premiere

Screening with
DeLightFuL – Design, Light, Future, Living
Director: Matteo Garrone
2016 / 9 min / Italy

We are invited into the extraordinary minds of Bill Corker, Barrie Marshall and John Denton, three intriguing and very different characters who have been friends since university. We learn how the trio formed Denton Corker Marshall and how their unique personalities and distinctive skills have coalesced into a unique working relationship that has created visionary buildings, not only in Australia but worldwide. Denton Corker Marshall has produced distinct, innovative and memorable architecture and urban designs such as the Stonehenge Visitors' Centre, Manchester Civil Justice Centre, Melbourne Museum as well as Australian embassies in Beijing, Tokyo and Jakarta, demonstrating the significant contribution of their practice to the global architectural scene.


Program 5  Getting Frank Gehry
Nov 2 @ 9:30  Purchase Tickets

Nov 5 @ 2:45  Purchase Tickets
Getting Frank Gehry
Director: Sally Aitken
59 min / 2015 / Australia

Screening with
Drone Cities
Director: Oliver Manzi
2017 / 15 min / UK

The University of Technology, Sydney’s new business school, is Frank Gehry’s daring ‘Treehouse project’, otherwise known as the 'crumpled brown paper bag’ to its critics. At first sight, the school will almost certainly shock anyone not already familiar with Gehry’s work elsewhere around the world. Designed to be radical inside and out, the building is sure to provoke conflicts for decades, and yet is highly likely to be hailed as a masterpiece of early 21st century architecture, just as so many of his other creations have already been. The film follows the drama as Gehry’s vision for this commission is realized. Through the construction of this building, we examine his challenging work over a period of 40 years. Four key phases of creativity, epitomized by four great buildings, The Gehry House, The Vitra Museum, The Guggenheim Bilbao and MIT’s Stata Centre, chart the evolution of ideas over a lifetime of controversy to play out on the downtown Sydney construction site. Drawing on a life's work defined by controversial and ground-breaking ideas, the world's greatest architect has inaugurated his first Australian building - and debate still rages over whether it is eyesore or icon.

Program 6  Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Nov 2 @ 9:15  Purchase Tickets
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Director: Matt Tyrnauer
92 min / 2016 / USA

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs

The film highlights Jane Jacobs’ magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she single-handedly undercuts her era’s orthodox model of city planning, exemplified by the massive urban renewal projects of New York’s “Master Builder,” Robert Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure centrally in our story as archetypes of the “bottom up” and the “top down,” respectively. They also figure as two larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs, a journalist with provincial origins, no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority seems at first glance to share little in common with Robert Moses, a high prince of government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York’s halls of power and privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of the city. In three suspenseful acts, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City gives audiences a front row seat to this battle, and shows how two opposing visions of urban greatness continue to ripple across the world stage, with unexpectedly high stakes.

Program 7  REM 
Nov 3 @ 6:45 Conversation w Cathleen McGuigan and  Nicolai Ouroussoff  Purchase Tickets

Nov 4 @ 9:30  Purchase Tickets
REM
Director: Tomas Koolhaas
2016 / 75 min / USA

Architecture is usually filmed from the outside, as an inanimate object. The few depictions of interiors are usually limited to still or static images of an empty building, reducing it to no more than an icon or sculpture. REM, the documentary by Rem Koolhaas's son, uses an unconventional approach by combining the human stories and experience of both the architect and the users of his architecture. The film explores Rem’s life, working methods, philosophy and internal landscape, from a never seen perspective of intimacy and immediacy. The result is having the feeling of being ‘inside’ his head. This perspective allows the viewer to understand Rem’s ideas in a way they couldn’t otherwise. These ideas are not merely explained as intellectual concepts but the viewer also sees these ideas in practice -the reality on the ground. They see how these ideas come to fruition in concrete and metal. The film shows how these structures, some massive and some small - dotted all around the globe - affect every aspect of the lives of the people that build them, use them and live inside them.
Program 8  Integral Man
Nov 3 @ 7:00 Q&A w/ Director Joseph Clement  Purchase Tickets
Nov 4 @ 7:00 Q&A w/ Director Joseph Clement Purchase Tickets

Integral Man
Director: Joseph Clement
2016 / 62 min / Canada – US Premiere

Screening with
Cabin at the River
Director: Silvia Zeitlinger
2017 / 8 min / Italy

After Euclid, Toronto’s Jim Stewart is the most published mathematician in the world. Stewart spent a decade and a small fortune building the home of his dreams to reflect his two obsessions: curves and music. The completed home, called Integral House, provides him with both.

A stunning architectural gem of subtly curved wood and vast, evocative spaces, the house stands in Toronto’s Rosedale neighborhood and is considered by many one of the city’s best performance spaces. Stewart took joy in hosting his trademark musical evenings with world-class guests, including the likes of Grammy–nominated Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman, featured in the film.

This debut film by landscape designer and artist Joseph Clement is an impressive work of art with its masterful combination of beautiful soundscapes and gorgeous architectural details. It ultimately delivers a finely crafted portrait of Stewart and his beloved home.



Program 9  Made in Ilima
Nov 3 @ 9:00 Q&A with Architects Michael Murphy, Alan Ricks and Director Thatcher Bean Purchase Tickets

Nov 4 @ 7:30 Q&A with Director Thatcher Bean Purchase Tickets
Made in Ilima
Director: Thatcher Bean
2017/ 65 min / USA / Program 9 / World Premiere

Screening with
Pisces
Director: Brad Deal
2017 / 3 min / USA

In the center of Equator Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ilima community remains one of the most isolated in the world. They have coexisted with endangered wildlife in their surrounding forest for generations, but as the pace of development has increased, this fragile ecosystem has suffered.

In 2012 they partnered with the African Wildlife Foundation and the architecture firm, MASS Design Group to create a new conservation focused primary school and community center. This film documents the collective building process - one aimed at leveraging local craft and ecological knowledge towards education, preservation, and beauty.
Program 10  Dries 
Nov 3 @ 8:45  Purchase Tickets
Nov 4 @ 9:00  Purchase Tickets
Dries
Director: Reiner Holzemer
2017 / 90 min / Belgium, Germany – NY Premiere

Screening with
EX of In House
Director: Spirit of Space
2017 / 6 min / USA

For the first time fashion designer Dries Van Noten allows a filmmaker to accompany him in his creative process and rich home life. For an entire year Reiner Holzemer documents the precise steps that Dries takes to conceive of four collections - the rich fabrics, embroidery and prints exclusive to his designs … as well as the emblematic fashion shows that bring his collections to the world and have become cult “must sees” at Paris Fashion Week.

This film offers an insight into the life, mind and creative heart of a master fashion designer who, for more than 25 years, has remained independent in a landscape of fashion consolidation and globalization. Original music by Colin Greenwood of Radiohead, and Matthew Herbert and Sam Petts-Davies.



Program 11  Zaha: An Architectural Legacy
Nov 4 @ 2:00  Purchase Tickets
Nov 5 @ 6:45  Purchase Tickets
Zaha: An Architectural Legacy
Directors: Jim Stephenson & Laura Mark
2017 / 27 min / UK

Screening with
Jean Nouvel: Reflections
Director: Matt Tyrnauer
2016 / 15 min / USA

Queen of Asbury Park
Director: Jillian Buckley
2017 / 10 min / USA

A year after Zaha Hadid died, this film takes a look at Zaha’s career and legacy through five chapters and buildings which signalled significant progressions in her work. The film takes us from her initial drawings and paintings while at the Architectural Association to her first built project at Vitra, then on to the Stirling Prize-winning MAXXI which secured her place in the architectural canon, then to the London Aquatics Centre – a building which made her known among the public – and finally finishing with the Maths Gallery at the Science Museum, completed just months after her death.

Featuring interviews with those who knew her including long-time collaborator Patrik Schumacher, architects Eva Jiricna and Nigel Coates, urbanist Ricky Burdett and engineer Hanif Kara, the film gives thoughtful insight into the impact Zaha had on the architectural profession. 



Program 12  Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect
Nov 4 @ 4:15 Q&A with Architect Kevin Roche and Director Mark Noonan Purchase Tickets
Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect
Director: Mark Noonan
2017 / 81 min / Ireland / US Premiere







Still working at age 95, Pritzker Prize-winning, Irish-American architect Kevin Roche is an enigma. He’s reached the top of his profession, but has little interest in celebrity and eschews the label “Starchitect”. Despite a lifetime of acclaimed work that includes the Ford Foundation, Oakland Museum of California and 40 years designing new galleries for The Metropolitan Museum in New York, he has no intention of ever retiring and keeps looking forward. Roche's architectural philosophy focuses on creating “a community for a modern society” and he has been credited with creating green buildings before they became part of the public consciousness. 

Panel discussion with Kevin Kennon from Kevin Kennon Architects, PC will take after the screening. 

Program 13  Designing Life: The Modernist Architecture of Albert C. Ledner
Nov 4 @ 3:30 Q&A with co-directors Catherine Ledner and Roy Beeson Purchase Tickets

Nov 5 @ 3:00 Q&A with co-directors Catherine Ledner and Roy Beeson Purchase Tickets
Designing Life: The Modernist Architecture of Albert C. Ledner
Director: Catherine Ledner & Roy Beeson
2017 / 47 min / US

Screening with
Isay Weinfeld
Director: Jillian Buckley
2016 / 9 min / USA

A Choice to Make
Director: Eric Reinholdt & Trent Bell
2017 / 8 min / USA

This documentary is an in-depth exploration of an influential New Orleans modernist architect, whose buildings for the National Maritime Union in the 1960s are now iconic figures in the NYC landscape. The film follows Albert Ledner’s journey from post WWII student of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin to the present day where Ledner continues to work and innovate at the age of 93. With interviews and on-site tours of his buildings, Albert details his thoughts and personal inspirations for his varied and experimental designs.



Program 14  Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse
Nov 4 @ 4:45 Q&A with Director Henrique Pina and Producers Maria Joao and Joao Miguel  Purchase Tickets

Nov 5 @ 5:00 Q&A with Director Henrique Pina and Producers Maria Joao and Joao Miguel Purchase Tickets
Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse
Director: Henrique Pina
2017 / 65 min / Portugal - US Premiere

Screening with
Ghost Story
Director: Sarah Elgart
2017 / 7 min / USA

The work of the architects at Aires Mateus clearly shows contemporaneity - in its complexity and contradiction - a difficult condition to express in the realm of architecture. The extent of the work that they've been developing for many years confirms this. Their proposals develop a language with a strong universal impact. From this universality emerges an adaptation to the territory rooted in a clear Portuguese tradition. One finds in the interpretation of the work of Aires Mateus architects an appetite - almost a desire - for a cinematographic appropriation: by the invention of a place; by the confrontation between body and matter; for the clarity of games of shadow; for the search of a silence of its own. The matter is found in reverse.
Program 15  Columbus 
Nov 4 @ 6:45  Purchase Tickets
Nov 5 @ 7:15  Purchase Tickets
Columbus
Director: Kogonada
2017 / 104 min / USA



Columbus is the first feature length fiction film screened by ADFF.
With its naturalistic rhythms, its focus on architecture and empathy for the complexities of families, debut director Kogonada's Columbus unfolds as a gently drifting, deeply absorbing conversation. With strong supporting turns from Parker Posey, Rory Culkin and Michelle Forbes, Columbus is also a showcase for the director's striking eye for the way physical space can affect emotions.

When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin (John Cho) finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana - a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library. As their intimacy develops, Jin and Casey explore both the town and their conflicted emotions: Jin's estranged relationship with his father, and Casey's reluctance to leave Columbus and her mother.


Kogonada will be present at the screening.

Program 16  Face of a Nation: What Happened to the World's Fair?
Nov 3 @ 8:30 Q&A with Architect Michael Sorkin, Director Mina Chow  Purchase Tickets

Nov 4 @ 2:45 Q&A with Architect Michael Sorkin, Director Mina Chow  Purchase Tickets
Face of a Nation: What Happened to the World's Fair?
Director: Mina Chow
2017 / 57 min / USA / World Premiere

Screening with
The Future of Cities
Director: Oscar Boyson
2016 / 18 min / USA

A Little Alcove: San Francisco Navigation Center
Director: Julian Pham
2017 / 4 min / USA

Daughter of immigrants, an idealistic architect struggles to keep her dream alive as she journeys to discover why America abandoned World’s Fairs. For generations of Americans, World’s Fairs captured visions of hope for the future as part of their collective memory. Mina Chow became fascinated with World’s Fairs when she saw pictures of her parents at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Beginning with their stories, Mina shares this legacy and the American values that inspired her to become an architect. She is excited to go to the 1st World's Fair in China. With over 73 million visitors, the Shanghai World Expo breaks all attendance records for any event in human history. But what she discovers there not only destroys her confidence as an American architect; it is symptomatic of a country that has lost its way. With her dream destroyed, Mina begins a search for answers … to find out what happened to the vision of World’s Fairs ... and what happened to America.

Program 17  SUPERDESIGN 
Nov 4 @ 5:30  Purchase Tickets
Nov 5 @ 4:30 Conversation with Director Francesa Molteni and co-curator Maria Cristine Didero  Purchase Tickets
SUPERDESIGN
Director: Francesca Molteni
2017 / 62 min / Italy

SUPERDESIGN is a film about the Italian Radical Movement in architecture & design in the 1960’s and 70’s. Through the words and stories of people who were part of that movement, we retrace the history and the heritage of the movement. They take us back to that time when everything seemed possible.

The mid-1960s represented a revolutionary time when the need for change has spread everywhere in the Western world and has pervaded all the aspects of life. Some beautiful archival historical images recreate the atmosphere of the period. It was a time of ‘positive turbulence’ also on an artistic level. And even today we can definitely catch a glimpse of this radical viruses in our interviewees!


Program 18  The Gamble House
Nov 4 @ 1:30 Q&A with Producer Lori Korngiebel and Ted Bosley Purchase Tickets

The Gamble House
Director: Don Hahn
2017 / 58 min / USA

Screening with
Before Design: Classic
Directed by Matteo Garrone
2016 / 7 min / Italy

The Gamble House is the incredible story of brothers Charles and Henry Greene who were pushed by their forceful father into a career in architecture only to design and build the most seminal and stunning Arts & Crafts house in America. The house, however, did not come without its price, both personally and professionally, for the Greene brothers, and for David and Mary Gamble who commissioned it. It’s a tale of American craftsmanship, international influence, artistic frustration, loss and triumph, which led to the completion of one of the shining examples of American architecture, known to fans of Back to the Future as Doc Brown’s house, and fans of architecture simply as The Gamble House.
ADFF PANELS
Panel 1  Van Alen Sessions: Infrastructure on Film
Nov 2 @ 6:00  Purchase Tickets

Join Van Alen Institute for the world premiere of Season Three of the short documentary series Van Alen Sessions, exploring the capacity and limits of rapidly changing technology in cities at a time of increasingly automated infrastructure, illuminated through the expert insight of designers and engineers and the stories of everyday people. These new episodes give viewers an up-close examination of how revolutionary robotic maintenance systems and retrofitted underground waterways are making our cities more productive and environmentally efficient.

Following the screening of the 2 short films, join us for a fast-paced conversation that digs deeper into how some cities are changing the narrative of our nation's crumbling infrastructure while engaging local citizens, including Nicole Flatow, editor, CityLab; Molly Heintz, chair, School of Visual Arts MFA Design Research, Writing and Criticism; and Lucy Wells, director, Van Alen Sessions, moderated by Steven Thomson, managing producer, Van Alen Sessions and programs and communications manager, Van Alen Institute.


Panel 1  What to do With 520 Miles of Coastline?
Nov 2 @ 6:00  Purchase Tickets
With 520 miles of coastline, New York is a city of islands and water. When local manufacturing declined in the mid-twentieth century, much of the city's shoreline fell into disuse and disrepair. Recently, New York has begun to reclaim this vital asset, cleaning up its waterways, reopening shoreline access, and building waterfront parks across the five boroughs. The work is part of an important larger trend in social awareness and a focus on public space in urban design.

Join Arup and ADFF for a screening of the short film “From Pier to Pier: New York City’s new backyard” followed by a panel discussion with leading members of the city's waterfront and public space communities.

Moderator
Francesca Birks: Leader of Foresight + Research + Innovation for Arup Americas

Panal
Captain Jonathan Boulware: Executive Director of South Street Seaport Museum
Archie Lee Coates IV: co-founder and partner at PLAYLAB, INC
Rob Holbrook: Director of Planning at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. NYCEDC


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