ADFF is coming to DC! After being postponed due to the pandemic, the new dates for the Festival are March 24 – 26. ADFF:DC will be presented in partnership with the National Building Museum and will spotlight 14 feature-length and short films from around the world, exploring innovation in sustainability, equitable development, historic preservation, and adaptive reuse. Legendary graphic designer Bruce Mau and his wife and business partner Bisi Williams, film directors Nathan Havey, Justin Monroe, Chris Gauthier, and designer Ronald Rael will be in town to participate in this edition of the Festival.
The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) is thrilled to announce the new dates for ADFF:DC. Taking place March 24-26, 2022, ADFF will partner with the National Building Museum to present 14 feature-length and short films from around the world that explore a range of timely issues, including innovation in sustainability, equitable development, historic preservation, and adaptive reuse.
ADFF:DC will feature special conversations following many of the screenings. After the opening night film, Mau, Bruce Mau, and his wife and business partner Bisi Williams will discuss their design practice Massive Change Network. Nathan Havey, the director of Beyond Zero, will speak about the film and his efforts with Conscious Capitalism. Following the film Holy Frit, director Justin Monroe will participate in a Q&A. Chris Gauthier, director of Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderland will be joined by the star of the film, Ronald Rael. After the closing night film, Another Kind of Knowledge, Danish architect Dorte Mandrup will be on stage for a conversation and Q&A.
ADFF:DC – March 24-26, 2022 (Washington, DC)
National Building Museum (401 F Street NW — 4 blocks from the National Mall)
Tickets can be purchased here.
- March 24
- 6:30-9:30 pm – Opening Night & Reception featuring Mau followed by a Q&A with film stars Bruce Mau and his wife and business partner Bisi Williams
- March 25
- 6:30-8:00 pm – Beyond Zero followed by a Q&A with the film’s director Nathan Havey and Joey Shea
- 6:45-10:15 pm – From Earth to Sky
- 8:45-10:15 pm – High Maintenance – The Life and Work of Dani Karavan
- 9:00-10:15 pm – Battleship Berlin & What Does It Take to Make A Building?
- March 26
- 12:00-1:30 pm – Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modern Masterpiece & Light Snatcher
- 12:15-1:30 pm – Architect of Brutal Poetry
- 2:15-4:15 pm – Holy Frit followed by a Q&A with the film’s director Justin Monroe
- 2:30-4:15 pm – Inside Prora
- 5:00-6:30 pm – Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands followed by a Q&A with the film’s star and designer Ronald Rael and the film’s director Chris Gauthier
- 5:15-6:45 pm – Breuer’s Bohemia
- 7:45-9:30 pm – Another Kind of Knowledge – Portrait of Dorte Mandrup followed by a Q&A with the film’s star Dorte Mandrup
The Films:
Another Kind of Knowledge – Portrait of Dorte Mandrup
2021 / 78 min / Denmark
Directors: Marc-Christoph Wagner and Simon Weyhe
Another Kind of Knowledge is the result of a conversation that started in 2017 with the renowned Danish architect Dorte Mandrup, an established figure in the Scandinavian architectural world who is increasingly achieving prominence on an international level. In this film portrait, Mandrup reveals the cornerstones of her practice — place, history, materiality, and sculpture — which she synthesizes to produce a consistent articulation of the contemporary.
Architect of Brutal Poetry
2021 / 70 min / Slovakia
Director: Ladislav Kabos
A film that pulls on the heartstrings, Architect of Brutal Poetry, tells the story of Hans Broos, a celebrated Brazilian architect with a German and Slovak background, painting a picture through his memories as they are slowly washed away by Alzheimer’s disease.
Battleship Berlin
2020 / 40 min / Germany
Director: Nathan Eddy
Berlin’s brutalist heritage is under fire. The city’s powerful Charité hospital wants to destroy two brutalist icons of the Cold War era, including an infamous former animal research laboratory called the Mäusebunker. This film tells the story of preservation, following a dedicated group of politicians, preservationists, architects, gallerists and students as they fight for an adaptive re-use of these magnificent, uncompromisingly unique structures.
Beyond Zero
2021 / 81 min / USA
Director: Nathan Havey
Beyond Zero tells the story of how Ray Anderson turned Interface, the largest carpet tile company in the world, into a mission-driven brand, committed to sequestering carbon in its products and making factories that sustain and replenish the ecosystem.
Breuer’s Bohemia
2021 / 73 min / USA
Director: James Crump
Breuer’s Bohemia surveys the houses designed by iconic architect Marcel Breuer from the 1950s through the ’70s, many of which were commissioned by politically progressive clients. The film offers a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community in a bygone period of American culture.
From Earth to Sky
2021 / 72 min / Canada
Director: Ron Chapman
From Earth to Sky explores the work of seven unique and accomplished Indigenous Architects as they design and complete extraordinary ‘buildings’ in cities and communities across North America and Turtle Island. They all define their individuality through their artistry, and bond in their philosophy and principles of protecting the planet. Beautiful and intimate, the film sparks a vital conversation paramount to transforming perspectives on how we approach our built environment.
High Maintenance – The Life and Work of Dani Karavan
2020 / 66 min / Israel
Director: Barak Heymann
Israeli artist Dani Karavan has created nearly 100 environmental installations all across the world, winning some of the most prestigious international art awards. Yet Karavan is far from satisfied. The film captures Karavan’s emotional moments as his monumental structures rapidly deteriorate, his advanced age begins to catch up with him, and the political climate in his country drives him mad. High Maintenance is a straightforward yet intricate film, as painful as it is humorous and passionate.
Holy Frit
2020 / 119 min / USA
Director: Justin Monroe
Holy Frit tells the story of Tim Carey, a talented, Los Angeles-based artist who, along with his company Judson Studios, bluffs his way into winning the commission to make the world’s largest stained-glass window of its kind. After a desperate search, Tim comes to learn about someone who might be able to help make his complicated design. As the documentary unfolds, the clash of two big personalities slowly transforms into the forging of a lasting friendship. This story gives a universally fun, heartfelt, and sometimes comedic look into the drama of any human endeavor which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Inside Prora
2019 / 100 min / Germany
Director, Nico Weber
The ‘Monster by the Sea,’ the ‘Colossus of Rugen’: Prora is considered the longest building in the world. Hitler’s own idea, it was built during the Third Reich, converted to one of the largest barracks in the GDR, and an abandoned site for many years following Germany’s reunification. A stunningly beautiful film, Inside Prora, feels its way through history, establishing unexpected connections between people and societies with modernist architecture and the phenomenon of mass tourism.
Light Snatcher
2021 / 29 min / Finland
Director: Charlotte Airas
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Light Snatcher investigates the intricate play of natural light in the architecture of Juha Leiviskä, one of the most successful contemporary Finnish architects and demonstrates how light plays with buildings and space in this cinematic masterpiece.
Mau
2021 / 76 min / Austria
Directors: Jono & Benji Bergmann
Mau is the first-ever feature-length documentary about the design visionary Bruce Mau. The film explores his unlikely creative journey and ever-optimistic push to tackle the world’s biggest problems with design. Over the span of his career, this creative dark horse has completed the transformation from world-class graphic designer to designer of the world. From advising global brands like Coca-Cola and Disney to rethinking a 1000-year plan for Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, Bruce Mau is a pioneer of transformation design and the belief that design can be used to create positive change in our world.
Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands
2021 / 63 min / USA
Director: Chris J. Gauthier
Set in the remote San Luis Valley of Colorado, the feature documentary Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands follows designers Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello’s experimentation with robotic manufacturing processes and traditional adobe architecture. Motivated by the neglect and abandonment of customary earthen building techniques that were once widely used throughout the region, in an area where Indigenous and European colonists have historically lived both in harmony and in conflict with one another, Rael and San Fratello reflect on this legacy to forge new methods of creative production.
Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modern Masterpiece
2020 / 55 min / USA
Director: Lauren Levine
Frank Lloyd Wright’s modern masterpiece, Unity Temple, is an homage to America’s most renowned architect during a pivotal time in his career. The film pulls back the curtain on Wright’s first public commission in the early 1900s to the painstaking efforts to restore the 100-year-old building back to its original beauty. The dedicated team of historians, craftspeople, members of the Unitarian congregation and Unity Temple Restoration Foundation reveal the history of one of Wright’s most innovative buildings that merged his love of architecture with his own spiritual values. The film intersperses the architect’s philosophies with quotes narrated by Brad Pitt.
What Does It Take to Make A Building?
2021 / 27 min / United Kingdom
Director Jim Stephenson
What Does It Take to Make A Building? is an intimate portrait of Sarah Wigglesworth’s life as an architect who uses her work as a vehicle for social change. Through her conversations with fellow architect Piers Taylor, Sarah discusses her architectural education to the experimental home and studio she designed and built with her partner Jeremy Till.