Neutra: Survival Through Design

This insightful documentary feature from PJ Letofsky serves as a profile of iconic Austrian-American Architect Richard Neutra, whose work and legacy have helped shape the modern understanding of design, architecture and the interconnected fabric of nature. Today, Richard's legacy lives on through his son, Dion, who has taken up his father's mantle after nearly three-decades under his mentorship.

Jaime Lerner - Uma História de Sonhos

Relics of the Future

A documentary featuring internationally renowned photographer Toni Hafkenscheid as he explores hidden stories behind iconic architectural structures once considered "Visions of the Future" from the 1960's. This film is a light-hearted look at the way we perceive life and embrace modern advancements. It is a photography expose that becomes a personal journey of self-discovery while exploring innovative Visions of the Future that celebrate memories of Toni's, and our, collective past.

Tadao Ando: Samurai Architect

Tadao Ando (b.1941) is a world-renowned architect, and a recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His calm, minimalist architecture with elegant concrete designs reflects the Zen principle of simplicity. In the film he reveals the experience a building should evoke, as he discusses a number of iconic designs, such as The Row House and The Church of Light.

Gaudí, l’arquitecte de Déu

“Gaudí, l’arquitecte de Déu” is a story of faith, of overcoming, about five lay that decided to create an assossiation to demonstrate that Gaudí deserves one of most valuable titles of the Church: beatification. The Pro-Beatification Association of Antoni Gaudí has been working more than 25 years to manage to beatify the architect of Reus, picking up all witnesses and proofs that demonstrate that Gaudi lived like a beatus and, the most difficult part, wiaiting for a miracle to happen attributed do Gaudí himself, an essential condition for his beatification. The documentary will follow this case, showing Gaudi’s life and work from a new outlook, more intimate and linked to spirituality and beliefs of the architect.

Así Nació el Obelisco

The construction of the Obelisco in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Begiak hesteko artean

The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.

Inside Prora

On the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea lies one of the most megalomaniac projects built by the Nazis. The ‘Monster by the Sea’, a colossus of brickwork that stretches for kilometres, intended as a futurist holiday resort for the inhabitants of the Third Reich. A paragon of ‘guilty architecture’. Later occupied by the communist regime, it has since the fall of the Wall fallen victim to property developers who have found it a tough nut to crack. Nico Weber’s Inside Prora uncovers the storied history of a project that symbolises the utopian intentions of modernism and the emergence of mass tourism.

Alvar Aalto: tekniikka ja luonto

The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) is one of the great figures of modern architecture, ranked alongside Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. This film analyses Aalto’s uniquely successful resolution of the demands and possibilities created by new technology and construction materials with the need to make his buildings sympathetic both to their users and to their natural surroundings. His inventive use of timber in particular represents both a reference to the forest landscape of Finland and a building material that is ‘warm’ and extremely adaptable. Filmed in Finland, Italy, Germany and the USA, this documentary shows how the Finnish natural environment and art traditions were essential elements in Aalto’s pioneering harmonization of technology and nature.

Phantasia

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Toorumi Pojad

In the same vein as Meri's other documentations, this one takes advantage of the glasnost policy to discuss the social and ecologic impact of the Russian oil industry on the natives and the lands they inhabit.

Orsay, les grandes métamorphoses

Inaugurated in 1986 by François Mitterrand, a link between the Louvre and Pompidou, Orsay houses the largest collection of Impressionist art in the world. Project after project, the museum has been transformed to modernize and welcome more visitors, while preserving its historic character. Challenges taken up with each new project.

Arquitetura, A Transformação do Espaço

A film in three movements. In the first one, we find a historical synthesis of Brazilian architecture, from the slaves' dwellings to the Ministry of Education Building. In the second segment, architects such as Burle Marx, Lina Bo Bardi, Grigori Warchavchik and Joaquim Cardoso talk about architecture's social function. In the third movement, inhabitants of some Brazilian cities discuss the space they live in.

Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova

In 1967, de Andrade was invited by the Italian company Olivetti to produce a documentary on the new Brazilian capital city of Brasília. Constructed during the latter half of the 1950s and founded in 1960, the city was part of an effort to populate Brazil’s vast interior region and was to be the embodiment of democratic urban planning, free from the class divisions and inequalities that characterize so many metropolises. Unsurprisingly, Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (Brasília, Contradictions of a New City, 1968) revealed Brasília to be utopic only for the wealthy, replicating the same social problems present in every Brazilian city. (Senses of Cinema)

Wiener Barock - Der Architekt dreier Kaiser

Lewerentz Divine Darkness

A cultural-historical portrait of the renowned and enigmatic architect Sigurd Lewerentz, who rarely allowed himself to be captured on film.

Живые камни Саксайуамана

Sacsayhuamán, an ancient citadel amidst the Peruvian Andes, is an architectural marvel. It was built more than 900 years ago, and no living person knows how such large rocks were fitted so perfectly into walls. This documentary takes us on a tour of Sacsayhuamán, offering a brief history of the site, and clues that may help to its understand how it was made. It was edited from photos and video taken in July 2012, when Russian geophysicists conducted soil research there, at the request of Peru's Ministry of Culture.

Pugin: God's Own Architect

Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin is far from being a household name, yet he designed the iconic clock tower of Big Ben as well as much of the Palace of Westminster. The 19th-century Gothic revival that Pugin inspired, with its medieval influences and soaring church spires, established an image of Britain which still defines the nation. Richard Taylor charts Pugin's extraordinary life story and discovers how his work continues to influence Britain today.

L'amatore

The memory of Piero Portaluppi, a Milanese architect who reached the peak of his fame during the 20 years of the Fascist regime, comes back to life, both through the rediscovery of his work today and in a previously unpublished film diary in 16 mm, shot and edited throughout his lifetime. A man of great charm and power, Portaluppi lived through a grandiose but tragic era with ironic detachment, as if dancing across things as he created beauty. History marches on implacably, radically transforming the arena in which the eclectic artist and his large family lived and worked.

Arata Isozaki: Early work in Japan

Arata Isozaki: Early Work in Japan takes a detailed look at the architect's pieces, exploring applauded projects such as the EXPO '70 Osaka Festival Plaza, Gunma Prefectural Museum of Modern Art and Kitakyushu Municipal Library. The extraordinary series of architectural breakthroughs made during this time contributed significantly to the evolution of contemporary architecture worldwide, and eventually gained him his first foreign commission