| Nov 3, 2021 Cairo, Egypt: Jan 26-30, at Film My Design Film Festival— 8 films over five days
ADFF:ONLINE
From Nov 17 - Dec 3, anyone in the US and Canada can watch any of the films, anytime, from your online devices, and on Roku and Apple TV.
|
| | | ADFF FEATURE-LENGTH FILMS |
| Another Kind of Knowledge - Portrait of Dorte Mandrup
2021 / 78 min / Denmark Directors: Marc-Christoph Wagner and Simon Weyhe
Another Kind of Knowledge is the result of a conversation that started in 2017 with the renowned Danish architect Dorte Mandrup, who for years has been an established figure in the Scandinavian architectural world, and is increasingly achieving prominence on an international level. In this portrait film, Mandrup unfolds the cornerstones of her practice—predicated on the synthesis of place, history, materiality, and sculptural—resulting in a consistent articulation of the contemporary.
|
| Architect of Brutal Poetry 2021 / 70 min / Slovakia Director: Ladislav Kabos
An old man fails to recognize his own face in the mirror. He is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Little by little, his memories get washed away. One day he decides to tell the story of his life to his reflection in the mirror. The man is Hans Broos, a famous Brazilian architect, German by origin. The mirror he confesses to acts as a reflection of his own memories.
|
| Battleship Berlin 2021 / 40 min / Germany Director: Nathan Eddy
Berlin's brutalist heritage is under fire. The city's powerful Charité Hospital wants to destroy two brutalist icons of the Cold War era, including an infamous former animal research laboratory called the Mäusebunker. Meanwhile, a dedicated group of politicians, preservationists, architects, gallerists and students fight for an adaptive re-use of these magnificent, uncompromisingly unique structures. Who will win? No matter the outcome, you're left with the impression that preservation can be brutal.
|
| Beyond Zero 2021 / 81 min / USA Director: Nathan Havey
Ray Anderson had spent 20 years building Interface, the largest carpet tile company in the world, when he was blindsided with a new kind of problem in 1994. That year he lost a large order when an environmental consultant objected to buying his carpet tiles. To make sure this never happened again, Ray convened an environmental task force and scheduled to share his environmental vision in a kick-off speech. But he had not a clue what to say. Serendipitously, a copy of Paul Hawken’s new book, The Ecology of Commerce, arrived on Ray’s desk. Desperate for inspiration, Ray tore into the book hoping to find a vision beyond mere legal compliance. What he found hit him like a spear in the chest. It changed his life forever, and set his company on a mission with the potential to change the world.
|
| Breuer's Bohemia 2021 / 73 min / USA Director: James Crump
The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which tends to be obscured by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects. Breuer’s Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in the 50s -70s, many of which were commissioned by politically progressive clients—chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin—who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, and others, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, art, and personal letters.
|
| From Earth to Sky 2021 / 72 min / Canada Director: Ron Chapman
From Earth to Sky explores the work of seven unique and accomplished Indigenous architects as they design and complete extraordinary buildings in cities and communities across North America and Turtle Island in Lake Erie. The architects featured are Tammy Eagle Bull and Douglas Cardinal, the first Indigenous architects in North America. Others featured are Wanda Dalla Costa, Alfred Waugh, Brian Porter, Daniel Glenn and Patrick Stewart—all of whom define their individuality and artistry through their principles of protecting the planet. Diverse in gender, age and artistic approach, each relates harrowing tales of dysfunction, poverty, violence, and assimilation, ultimately overcoming adversity to become the top in their field.
|
| High Maintenance - The Life and Work of Dani Karavan
2020 / 66 min / Israel Director: Barak Heymann
Israeli artist Dani Karavan has created nearly 100 environmental installations across the world. He has won some of the most prestigious international art awards and is constantly asked to speak or lecture about his groundbreaking work. Yet Karavan is far from satisfied. His monumental structures are rapidly deteriorating. His advanced age is starting to catch up with him. The political climate in his country is driving him mad, as does the film’s director, whose questions betray his infuriating artistic ignorance. In addition, Karavan becomes embroiled in a serious political and artistic conflict over his latest commission, a monument to Polish nationals who have risked their lives saving Jews during World War II.
|
| Holy Frit 2020 / 119 min / USA Director: Justin Monroe
Tim Carey is a talented, LA-based artist. He’s also a bit of a jackass, who uses wit and humor to charm you into forgiving his flaws. As a Hail Mary, Tim and the company he works for, Judson Studios, bluff their way into winning the commission to make the world’s largest stained-glass window of its kind, beating out 60 companies from around the globe. The problem is, Tim has no idea how to make his complicated design. After a desperate search, Tim comes to learn about someone who might have the answer—a world-famous, Italian glass maestro, named Narcissus Quagliata. From the moment Narcissus arrives, Tim quickly learns that his own talent and humor can only take him so far. If he has any chance to make it to the end of the project and potentially achieve greatness, he has to confront his personal demons of self-importance, artistic merit, business instincts and spiritual insecurities. He has to put down his ego and submit to the life and artistic lessons of the complicated master.
|
| Inside Prora
2019 / 100 min / Germany
Director: Nico Weber
Prora, the longest building in the world, has been referred to as the "Monster by the Sea" and the "Colossus of Prora". Commissioned by Hitler prior to WWII, it was originally conceived as a three-mile-long vacation camp with 10,000 seaside-facing rooms on the island of Rügen. Instead, when Germany instigated WWII, it was converted to military barracks, then became an abandoned site for many years following reunification. Now, hotels, museums and holiday homes are springing up. Capitalism rules!
Inside Prora tells more than the transformation of this gigantic labyrinth. It’s an unfolding of historic layers; unexpected connections of society with modernist architecture and the phenomenon of mass tourism. The film takes us on a journey through time and space – and yet, always travels back to Prora.
|
| Light Snatcher 2021 / 29 min / Finland
Director: Charlotte Airas
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Light plays with buildings and space. It’s like reverberation in music. Light waves indeed act like sound waves.
Light Snatcher investigates the intricate play of natural light in the work of Juha Leiviskä, one of Finland’s most successful contemporary architects.
|
| Mau 2021 / 76 min / Austria
Directors: Jono & Benji Bergmann
Mau is the first feature-length documentary about the design visionary Bruce Mau and explores his unlikely creative journey and ever-optimistic push to tackle the world’s biggest problems with design.
Over the span of his career, this creative dark horse has completed the transformation from world-class graphic designer to designer of the world. He’s advised global brands like Coca Cola and Disney. Helped rethink a 1000-year plan for Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. Worked with the greatest living architects like Rem Koolhaas & Frank Gehry on books and museums. Even rebranded nations such as Guatemala and Denmark. In short, Bruce Mau is a pioneer of transformation design and the belief that design can be used to create positive change in our world.
|
| Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands
2021 / 63 min / USA
Director: Chris J. Gauthier
Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderland is about Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello and their work to connect contemporary technology with the legacy of pottery making and adobe architecture in the Southwest. Mud Frontiers, the name of their project, uses 3D-printing technology to build adobe structures on Rael’s ancestral land in the San Luis Valley. Located in southern Colorado, the San Luis Valley is a remote and rural area with a distinct culture, language and landscape.
Motivated by both the neglect of traditional adobe houses that once covered the region and the rise of concrete buildings, Studio Rael San Fratello has for the past few years been developing prototypes of 3D-printed adobe structures. Much of the film focuses on their pioneering work in the field of additive manufacturing, first with earthenware ceramics and now with architecture.
|
| Museum Town
2018 / 76 min / USA
Director: Jennifer Trainer
In 2017, MASS MoCA became the largest museum for contemporary art in the world, but just three decades before, its vast brick buildings were the abandoned relics of a massive shuttered factory. How did such a wildly improbable transformation come to be? A testament to tenacity and imagination, Museum Town traces the remarkable story of how a rural Massachusetts town went from economic collapse to art mecca.
With appearances by artists ranging from James Turrell to David Byrne, narration by Meryl Streep, and a soundtrack from John Stirratt of the band Wilco, Museum Town captures the meeting of small-town USA and the global art world as it tells a tale that is, like any great artwork, soulful, thought-provoking and unforgettable.
|
| Openings: Gazes Beyond the Limit
2021 / 52 min / Italy
Directors: Francesca Molteni & Mattia Colombo
Openings explores the world of the architectural elements that embody the concept of threshold, of openness, and of the relationship between inside and outside, through the voices of Italian and international architects, but also by listening to the voices who speak the language of music, sports, art, and the territory. Addressing the theme of the threshold in immaterial, almost “spiritual” terms, the film investigates the close relationship between art and life, between necessity and creative effort, between philosophy and civil thought. Along the Via Emilia, the geographical threshold par excellence, this journey is made of stops, crossings and wanderings.
|
| Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright's Modern Masterpiece
2020 / 55 min / USA
Director: Lauren Levine
Frank Lloyd Wright’s modern masterpiece, Unity Temple, is an homage to America’s most renowned architect during a pivotal time in his career. The film pulls back the curtain on Wright’s first public commission in the early 1900’s and the painstaking efforts to restore the 100-year old building back to its original beauty. The dedicated team of historians, craftspeople, members of the Unitarian congregation and Unity Temple Restoration Foundation reveal the history of one of Wright’s most innovative buildings that merged his love of architecture with his own spiritual values. The film intersperses the architect’s philosophies with quotes narrated by Brad Pitt.
|
| What Does It Take To Make A Building?
2021 / 27 min / United Kingdom
Director: Jim Stephenson
What Does It Take is an intimate portrait of Sarah Wigglesworth's life as an architect who uses her work as a vehicle for social change. Through her conversations with fellow architect Piers Taylor, Sarah discusses her architectural education (which was dominated by men and almost led to her quitting the industry before she graduated), through to the experimental home and studio she designed and built with her partner Jeremy Till.
|
| | | | | | | |
