A Pile of Ghosts

A ghost story of urbanization. The last hotel, which has been condemned for demolition like the rest of the town, is still standing. The owner Charles imagines himself with a female visitor in the scenes of a Hollywood classic. The vexing interplay of documentary and fiction, in which construction workers, investors and real estate agents appear, takes place in contemporary China, where cities are built entirely on speculation, dictated by the fictions of capitalism.

A Wes Anderson-ish Singapore

This documentary short film takes viewers on a photographic adventure across the island of Singapore, as it documents the changes in the built environment against the backdrop of the pandemic situation and helps viewers rediscover everything accidentally or intentionally "Wes Anderson" about Singapore.

BLOCO ARCHITECTS IN CONSTRUCTION

The documentary presents the daily life of an architectural firm BLOCO Arquitetos and shows as a backdrop reflections and criticisms about the relationship between architecture and the city and its works in the wild environment of the Cerrado, in the center of the country. According to them, the principles of modern architecture produced in the beginning of Brasília can still serve as inspiration for the production of an essentially Brazilian contemporary architecture connected to the challenges of the present day, especially in relation to the preservation of the region's native biome. The film was shot in two locations: Brasília and Chapada dos Veadeiros. Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is a city planned and built in the 60's and is still today one of the main international references of modern architecture.

Best in the World

Copenhagen is an exemplary city. Exemplary in its successes. But also in the downsides that are starting to show. From a city which was in the early 1990s on the brink of bankruptcy, it has undergone a tremendous transformation and is today coined as one of the best and most liveable cities in the world. But the gains are increasingly outnumbered by noticeable losses. Today, social and economic divides between the haves and the have nots haunt both city and countryside, and more and more people are starting to ask whether the run-down city of the past was in some ways preferable. The film explores these general dilemmas. It looks at the gains and losses that Copenhagen has experienced over the last 30 years and asks what we need for the city to be in the 21st century.

Bo(i)staden: den sociala idén

Den sociala idén. En god bostad tillhör människans grundläggande behov och problemen med för få och för dyra bostäder är inte nya. Anders Wahlgren har gjort filmer om arkitektur och boende i snart 50 år. Nu ser han tillbaka på bostadsfrågan genom tiderna med exempel från sina tidigare filmer. Del 1 av 2.

Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens

A documentary about the most distinctive Athenian building type, the polykatoikía, and the reconstruction of the city through the life of the anonymous lay builders and their housewives, who were the most unlikely “co-authors.”

Concrete Landscape

Concrete Landscape presents the portuguese architect Alvaro Siza through his relationship with brazil, including his family roots in Belém and investigating his only work in the country, the building of ibere camargo institution, located in Porto Alegre.

Contrapunctus V

An experimental documentary featuring Japanese urban architecture. A time capsule of sorts, centered on (biological or artificial) brain states, it makes different themes and voices converge and connect in a rhizomatic, multitasking structure reminiscent of musical counterpoint (and attention deficit behaviour symptoms).

Exterior Day: Esterno giorno

Inspired by a famous exchange of letters between Michelangelo Antonioni and Mark Rothko, “Esterno giorno” is an experimental love letter to Italian cinema. Following in the footsteps of the characters played by Monica Vitti, the film retraces the geography of Antonioni’s vision, pushing the boundaries between subject and landscape, fiction and reality.

Gagarine

I höghuset i miljonprogramsområdet Cité Gagarine utanför Paris, drömmer 16-årige Yuri om att bli astronaut. Övergiven av sina föräldrar har bostadsområdet och människorna som befolkar det blivit hans familj. När det uppdagas att hela området ska rivas väcker det starkt motstånd. En efter en tvingas de ut ur sina lägenheter men Yuri kommer inte ut. Besatt av sin kärlek till rymden har han ett alldeles särskilt sätt att göra motstånd och när invånarna samlas för att protestera slås de av häpnad. Filmen spelades in när husen revs och är gjord i nära samarbete med de som tvingades se på när deras hem jämnades med marken.

Lelé's House

The non-visible life that is impregnated in the memory of a residence. The short film presents in a poetic way the house that the architect Joao Filgueiras Lima, Lelé, designed in Brasília, in the early 70s.

Light without Sun

A documentary about Can Lis, a house designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon on the island of Mallorca and considered among the most significant projects of the twentieth century. Set within one day, the film reflects the sensory nature of architecture, using interviews, narrative, and choreography to challenge how buildings are documented.

Lines

Lines is a visual essay, a tangle of stories and observations, set in the exemplary post-socialist city of Bratislava; a place experiencing dynamic transformation.

Lower Grand

The secret life of a street known from movies, television shows and commercials. Lower Grand chronicles the uneven recovery after the Great Recession through the aspect of this familiar setting. Depending which side you're on, its portals are a window on the upper crust of American society or its lower depths.

Miljonprogrammet ( in swedish)

Filmskaparna syftar ge en helhetsbild av miljonprogrammet med tyngdpunkt på ett konstruktivt framtidsperspektiv, som visar områdenas viktiga roll i en hållbar samhällsutveckling. De vill ta avstamp i nuläget och dess utmaningar och en fördjupad bakgrund till miljonprogrammets bebyggelse, som kulturskatt och framgångshistoria – liksom till dess politiska tillkomst, kriser och förnyelseerfarenheter. Filmen lyfter fram erfarenheter av den viktiga forskning och utveckling som har pågått i ett 30-tal år och som sammantaget visar på stora möjligheter. Programmet utmynnar i ett antal aktuella utvecklingsprojekt.

Mr Funkis

Filmaren Anders Wahlgren träffade den åttioårige arkitekten Sven Markelius första gången 1969 när hans sista byggnad Sverigehuset var färdigt, och de blev goda vänner. De många timslånga samtalen spelades in på band, som legat orörda i femtio år. Det är de enda intervjuer som gjorts med Markelius. Han tillhörde den mest radikala kretsen inom svensk arkitektur och ansåg att en av de viktigaste uppgifterna för en arkitekt var att rita billiga bostäder, lika aktuellt idag.

Post-Soviet Symphony

If architecture is "frozen music", then the façades of houses are its score. We explore the architecture of the post-Soviet space, from wooden architecture to Baroque and classicism, from Art Nouveau to Stalinist and Khrushchev architecture, traces of which are found in the modern panel buildings known as “human anthills”. By doing so, we are trying to understand how this centuries-old symphony could sound and look, and most importantly, we find that irreconcilable conflict of personality and mass, the unique and the typical, that is reflected even “in stone”.

Shivering wall

It’s a self-examined process for assess your present time. The smog represented a spiritual inside a space. It could be the spiritual from you or others. It makes you look at yourself in a different angle, but you’re still in the group. What would you do and what’s the connection between you and others?

Soft City

A visual and clear guide to building better density to create happier, more livable cities. With foreword by Jan Gehl.

Soon at your home

In a small French village, a rumour about the construction of a tower in the heart of the village emerges. Is this nonsense? No one knows where this information comes from, but the idea makes you think.

Street Level/The Concrete Landscape

The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms

A magical-realist window into a man's experience of chronic illness, mixing paintings with live-action documentary footage to explore his inner world and relationship with his partner.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist who uses a somnambulist to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.

The Still Sound

"The Still Sound" reconstructs a real, imaginary and sometimes even melancholy italian city called Rovigo, a much longer-lived scenography than all of us human beings. Buildings, monuments, their details and streets take on another form for a few minutes, exploring the intimate vitality of their sounds to tell a new and magnificent story that is also ours, but above all it's theirs. They are all magnificent and silent sources of sounds, totally belonging to this city.

Under a Nordic Sky

After nearly a century when electric lighting has dominated the design of building interiors, a return to the use of daylight as the main ambient light source is motivated by energy, environmental, and health considerations. Addressing these issues, this film provides the essential knowledge and background to students and practicing professionals who wish to tackle the challenging endeavor of illuminating buildings under a Nordic sky using daylight as the main ambient light source, supplemented by energy-efficient electric lighting systems.

Venice Elsewhere

Venice is a beauty parlour in Zagreb, a giant mall in Istanbul, a Romanian village with more sheep than people, a waterway in the periphery of Berlin… Personal stories told by a handful of characters around the world who have never set foot in Venice, but who all have intimate ties with the city.

What Shall We Do With These Buildings?

“What Shall We Do With These Buildings?” is a documentary-dance film which explores the legacy of Soviet architecture in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Moving fluidly between interview and dance, the film playfully investigates the dynamic impact that these buildings have on the people who live with them. What should be done with them? Should they be preserved, destroyed, repurposed? Since this film was shot, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and Kharkiv is now being shelled. Now, it serves as a snapshot of an independent, hopeful Ukraine trying to find its feet, at a time when that independence has never been more fragile.

Woodstories

The documentary ‘Woodstories’, directed by Building Pictures, is a tribute to wood which tells eight stories narrated by eight architects. The story unfolds in different chapters: Memories, Application, Senses, Comfort, Sustainability, Time, Carpenters, and Industry. During the film, the architects – Carlos Azevedo, Diogo Aguiar, Diogo Zenha Morais, Francisco Vieira de Campos, Graça Correia, João Luís Carrilho da Graça, João Mendes Ribeiro, Laura Lupini, Luís Sobral and Manuel Aires Mateus – discuss the importance of wood in Portuguese architecture from the time we were born until the future.