| October 25, 2017
Thank you for attending the Short Films Walk (SFW). Despite some early rain, we had a great turnout. SFW is a collaboration with Soho Design District and is an evening where you can see some great short films about architecture and design, and leads up to the full Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF).
ADFF returns to Cinépolis Chelsea next week for a ninth season of compelling films and a robust lineup of speakers, programming and interactive experiences. Over the course of five days (November 1 - November 5), the festival will screen a total of 34 films including four world premieres, six U.S. premieres and two New York premieres. The festival films are selected to be interesting to both the design professional and the general audience.
Among the world premieres, attendees will get the first look at Made in Ilima, a film about a primary school and community center built in the Congo by the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winner, MASS Design. The 3 other world premieres include SUPERDESIGN, Face of a Nation and Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse, a film about the uniquely developed architectural language embodied in the work of the Portuguese architecture firm.
The opening night film will be the U.S. premiere of Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place. Other festival highlights include new films about Kevin Roche, Rem Koolhaas, Meis van der Rohe, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.
In addition to the curated selection of films, ADFF will present a series of intimate discussions with prominent architects, designers, industry leaders and filmmakers. Be sure to stop by the Festival Lounge and enjoy some virtual reality experiences, browse the Phaidon pop-up bookstore and have a cocktail created by Honey's of Bushwick. Also, architects can get continuing education credits for attending the film programs.
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| Selected films from this year's ADFF NY programs |
| | Made in Ilima Director: Thatcher Bean
2017 / 65 min / USA – World Premiere
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| In the center of Equateur 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. They partnered with the African Wildlife Foundation and the architecture firm, MASS Design Group in 2012 to create a new conservation-focused primary school and community center. This film documents the collective building process aimed at leveraging local craft and ecological knowledge towards education, preservation and beauty.
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| Director: Mark Noonan
2017 / 81 min / Ireland – US Premiere
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| 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. |
| Director: Tomas Koolhaas
2016 / 75 min / USA
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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 Tomas, 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.
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| Columbus
Director: Kogonada
2017 / 100 min / USA
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| 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.
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| SUPERDESIGN
Director: Francesca Molteni
2017 / 62 min / Italy – World Premiere
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| SUPERDESIGN is a film about the Italian Radical Movement in architecture and 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 these radical views.
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| Dries
Director: Reiner Holzemer
2017 / 90 min / Belgium & Germany – NY Premiere
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| | 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. |
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