Social & External
Big Time gets up close with Danish architectural prodigy Bjarke Ingels over a period of six years while he is struggling to complete his largest projects yet, the Manhattan skyscraper W57 and Two World Trade Center.
Beginning at the industrial revolution of the ‘great north’, Jenn Nkiru draws lines between peoples, cities, countries, buildings, movements, bodies and spaces(s) using a mixture of archive materials and new footage. There is little stillness as we are pushed and pulled through Black histories and communities across the city of Manchester and beyond. Nkiru has termed this filmmaking process “cosmic archeology”, and it is grounded in Afro-surrealism, experimental film and the Black arts movement.
On the tiny island of Martha's Vineyard, where presidents and celebrities vacation, trophy homes threaten to destroy the islands unique character. Twelve years in the making, One Big Home follows one carpenters journey to understand the trend toward giant houses. When he feels complicit in wrecking the place he calls home, he takes off his tool belt and picks up a camera.
A documentary film comparing current / everyday and historical / noble aspects of Prague.
Through booms and busts, Delft Theatres and its innovative gem The Nordic endured in Marquette, Michigan for almost 100 years. Bernie Rosendahl’s crusade to restore the historic arthouse to its former glory reveals a hidden cinema empire in the Upper Peninsula.
An extraordinary journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete and its ancestor, stone. Victor Kossakovsky raises a fundamental question: how do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?
A film essay contrasting the modern metropolis with its "golden age" from 1830-1930, with the participation of some of New York's leading political and cultural figures. Made at a time when the city was experiencing unprecedented real estate development on the one hand and unforeseen displacement of population and deterioration on the other. Empire City is the story of two New Yorks. The film explores the precarious coexistence of the service-based midtown Manhattan corporate headquarters with the peripheral New York of undereducated minorities living in increasing alienation.
No understanding of the modern movement in architecture is possible without knowledge of its master builder, Mies van der Rohe. Together with documentation of his life, this film shows all his major buildings, as well as rare film footage of Mies explaining his philosophy. Phyllis Lambert relates her choice of Mies as the architect for the Seagram building. Mies's achievements and continuing influence are debated by architects Robert A.M. Stern, Robert Venturi, and Philip Johnson, by former students and by architectural historians. Mies is seen in rare documentary footage.
Documentary about 4 large architectural landmarks that projected Portugal abroad.
Documentary about Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi made for the BBC series "Visions of Space".
Alan Yentob profiles the most successful female architect there has ever been, the late Zaha Hadid, who designed buildings around the globe from Austria to Azerbaijan.
Tracing the history of blue jeans around the globe.
Tadao Ando, a self-taught architect, proposes an international architecture that he believes can only be conceived by someone Japanese. His architecture mixes Piranesian drama with contemplative spaces in urban complexes, residences and chapels. This film presents the formative years of his impressive career before he embarked on projects in Europe and the United States.
Ferdinand de Lesseps, known as “The Great Frenchman”, will embark in the greatest adventure of his life: To unite the Pacific and Atlantic oceans through a Canal in the Isthmus of Panama – without knowing that this will cost him his reputation, thousands of innocent lives and the biggest financial scandal of all time, up to that point: the famous “Scandal of Panama”. Today, the French capital is known as “Paname”.
Filmed in Rome in the 1980s, the work draws on Borromini’s Baroque architecture and Il Sassetta’s St. Martin and the Beggar. Beavers contrasts winter’s subdued light with the verdant growth of spring, constructing a precise montage in which image and sound form a poetic dialogue.
A historical documentary documenting the rise, function, and abandonment of a 17 story building that once housed The Rochester Psychiatric Center. This film tells the story of the building through historical footage, interviews of former staff and patients who recount their memories of the behemoth facility while also exploring the abandoned building as it is today.
