9th Budapest Architecture Film Days, March 2017 by the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre Deadline: 15th November, 2016. Do you have a film on architecture or the city? Send it to us! The Budapest Architecture Film Days is now accepting submissions for its 9th edition, to be held in Budapest in March 2017. We are looking for works in all genres, forms and lengths related to design, architecture and built environment. Entry is free. The mission of the film festival is to generate a dialogue between architectural practice that finds inspiration in cinema, and cinema borrowing its subjects from architecture and…

We are delighted to collaborate with the Index blog “Urbanista” this year: Dávid Zubrecki recommends 5 must-see films from this year’s lineup and you can buy tickets for these screenings in one pack with the Urbanista pass. Strange and Familiar – Architecture on Fogo Island | 4th March, Friday | 18:00 and 6th March, Sunday | 13:30 You’ve Been Trumped | 4th March, Friday | 21:15 Last Exit Alexanderplatz | 5th March, Saturday | 17:00 The Land of Many Palaces | 5th March, Saturday | 19:00 Millionaire Basement Wars | 5th March, Saturday | 14:00 and 6th March, Sunday | 16:00 Dávid Zubrecki started…

Anna Bajomi Film: Christiania – 40 Years of Occupation (Robert Lawson, Richard Jackman,  2014, 76’) Friday 6 March – 19:00 The story of Christiania started in 1971. As a response to the severe housing problems of Copenhagen at the time, some young people squatted an abandoned military basis in an island of the city. And the community founded by the squatters is still working, after more than 40 years. In this documentary cheerful young and elderly members of the community tell us stories, through which we can gain insight to the island’s history, everyday life and important issues and conflicts…

Réka Kovács Film: If You Build It (Patrick Creadon, 2013, 86’) Satudray 7 March – 17:15 The hackneyed phrases related to teachers like ‘sowing the seeds’ or ‘founding the future’ get an update and shiny new meanings by this film. Even literally. As Emily Pilloton, project owner of Studo-H (and high school teacher) puts it after her schoolyear: “it wasn’t for nothing”. So there is a determined design nomad couple with a precisely made up curriculum, invited to the poorest (and dustiest) county of North Carolina by the progressive local superintendent. Poorest county or not, there is also a pick-up…

Vera Horváth Film: Machines of the Isle of Nantes (Dominique Deluze, 2013, ’52) Friday 6 March – 21:00 The old industrial port of Nantes was built on Île de Nantes, the last major island of the Loire before it runs into the Atlantic. The last boat left the port in 1987, closing down a page in the city’s history. The function of the industrial port was taken over by the ocean shore complex of Sainte-Nazaire, and the shipyards of Île de Nantes lost their function and fell into decay. The city council could not find new investors for the area,…

Dániel Kovács Film: Resort (Martin Hrubý, 2014, 24’) Saturday March 7 – 18:45 Often enough, one ignores the fact that even historic figures had private lives –  perhaps this is at least partly due to how preoccupied we are with our own. They too had rushed to pick up kids from school, bickered with spouses, gone to the movies, done their washing and cooking and ironing. In better times, they too would take family vacations. For Hungary’s state socialist elite under János Kádár, this would involve a heavily guarded resort complex at Balatonaliga, by the ‘Hungarian Sea’; the Czechoslovakian party elite would retire…

Samu Szemerey Film: London Orbital (Christopher Petit, Iain Sinclair, 2002, 77’) Saturday March 7 – 17:15 Ode to the world’s longest ringroad, a conversation on the edges of fiction, documentary and reflection, road movie on a highway closing onto itself and around a city – the work of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit steps beyond genres to map London’s subconscious. Who doesn’t ask herself while driving somewhere on the M0: what is actually this landscape, where they and everyone else just speed through? What is there in the transitional zone where the traditional notion of the city ends? The liminal…

Daniella Huszár Film: Estate, a Reverie (Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2015, 84’) Thursday March 5 – 19:00 Housing is one of the key themes of this year’s festival. The strongest piece among the films dealing with this topic is Estate, a Reverie, which documents the last days of a community living in Haggerston Estate, a social housing project in London. We chose this movie as the opening film because it tackles a policy issue that defines our everyday life with unique sensitivity and universal language. It treats a lurking and often untold crisis phenomenon with undisguised honesty that is as current…

Gábor Fehér Film: 16 Acres (Richard Hankin, 2012, 95’) Thursday March 6 – 19:00 What was the reason that public involvement could not succeed? What kind of personal and political interests slowed down progress? What was the reason that an architectural competition could not be enough? Why would we think at all it’s an architectural question per se? Why is the Ground Zero so different than any other site with the same parameters around the globe? Richard Hankin’s film rounds up the events, conflicts, and, of course, the emotions, which accompanied the much-needed answer to 9/11. It was evident that…

Samu Szemerey Film: Away from all suns! (Isabella Willinger, 2013, 77’) Sunday 9 March – 20:00 The short period of Russian Constructivism was a unique experiment to create a new architecture. The movement, which declined with the rise of Stalin’s cultural propaganda, set out to create the forms and spaces of modern society and the optimistic visions of progress. Its program was as radically new as its uncompromising aesthetics: housing compounds with kindergartens and canteens, public buildings with libraries and theatres showed the changing social roles of women, children and workers. This unprecedented heritage exists today mostly in ruins. Embedded…

Balázs Irimiás Films: Nakagin Capsule Tower: Japanese metabolist landmark on the edge of destruction (Yamazaki Rima, 2010, 58’); Intercalary spaces (Damien Faure, 2012, 50’) Saturday 8 March – 21:00 The Nakagin Capsule tower is a landmark of Japanese architecture; even those know it, for which metabolism does not extend beyond their own diet. They might not remember its name, only the iconic 3D dominos hidden behind a highway in Tokyo. The movement that pinned Japanese architecture onto the world map – Metabolism – had the power of joint thinking, joint dreaming and joint vision of built environment, popping up during…

Bálint Kádár Film: The Venice syndrome (Andreas Pichler, 2012, 80’) Sunday 9 March – 17:30 Venice is a strong brand today, a must-see destination, and big business. It is a must see place, and all are coming to see it. All those tourists rarely think about how a city of 200,000 inhabitants in its glory days can support 21 million visitors each year. It cannot. Today we reached the moment when the number of tourists arriving to Venice each day outnumbers the 58,000 locals still resident here. The danger is evident, if one recognizes that a city is not merely…

Dániel Kovács Film: Precise poetry: Lina Bo Bardi’s architecture (Belinda Rukschcio, 2013, 55’) Satudray 8 March – 17:00 Architecture is the answer to all the problems of humanity. Lina Bo Bardi’s work is based on that theory. She is the same age as modernity: born in 1914, the year of the Werkbund exhibition, in Cologne. She started her career in her home country, in Italy. Though Precise Poetry is a film on her life’s work, directed by her sixty years younger German colleague, Belinda Rukschcio; it is focusing entirely on Bardi’s Brazilian works. Lina and her husband arrived to Brazil…

Réka Kovács Film: Space Metropoliz (Fabrizio Boni, Giorgio de Finis, 2013, 100’) Friday March 7 – 21:00 Talking seems to rule this film a bit too much! The voluble Italian speech of this many contributors puts our ability of reading subtitles to the test, and as the story goes on, we can sweat more and more about missing some important details. Because it is not only the words that flow, but the excellent thoughts and ideas of these people, one better than the other. Avoiding any bullshit, there is always a new twist, point of view or truth that keeps…

6th Budapest Architecture Film Days, March 2014 Deadline: 31th October, 2013. Do you have a film on architecture? The Budapest Architecture Film Days is now accepting submissions for its 6th edition to be held in Budapest in March 2014. We are looking for works in all genres, forms and lengths related to design, architecture and built environment. Entry is free. The mission of the film festival is to generate a dialogue between architectural practice that finds inspiration in cinema, and cinema borrowing its subjects from architecture and the city. For more information about the festival please visit www.kek.org.hu/filmnapok/en. For related…

KÉK presents the next event of the Spring Architecture Film Series: Vacant Films: Torre David and IUnfinished Italy May 27., 8pm, Müszi (1085 Budapest, Balaha Lujza tér 1.) Torre David 2013, 22 mins, colour, Venezuelan film with English subtitles R: Urban-Think Tank [nggallery id=21] Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas designed by the distinguished Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home of a community of more than 750 families,…