The second edition of the Venice Architecture Film Festival

ArchiTuned has launched a short-films competition on architecture, a selection, which includes short documentaries, docu-films, animations, experimental films by international authors, will be presented during the Festival and will include a shortlist of five best short films and one short film to be awarded on the final day.  The shortlist of films and the official award for the short film winner of the 2021 edition will be decided by the association ArchiTuned in collaboration with a Jury of experts and professionals from the world of architecture and cinema.
For the further exploration and deeper research upon the theme of community, VAFF presents a selection of long films. This cinematographic review has been created in collaboration with a larger network of professionals in the field. On the occasion of the 2021 festival, we will present films in cooperation with a.o. the Canadian Centre for Architecture, BARQFestival, Move Cine Arte, aeternamfilms.
As a growing path and an inspiring source of creativity, the VAFF is pleased to announce the section VAFF/ fringe in cooperation with two of the leading universities to present the perspective and genius of young talents. A selection of the best films of the students from the IUAV University of Venice - Department of Architecture and Arts and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London will be screened as part of the program.
Additionally, titles and works of interest will be presented in the out of competition section.
Cinema, as the narrative lens chosen to unravel stories, social realities in the urban landscapes and ways of living, is the language chosen to communicate with a wider audience aiming to reflect on our trends, on how diverse environments get inhabited and questioning our possible future scenarios.
Architecture itself will be presented under different perspectives and investigated as a fundamental instrument that influences and shapes our habits, our future, the sense of community we are building everyday by living together in our spaces.
The films in the program will explore specific urban settings and a wide variety of elements characterizing diverse inhabited places, trying to identify what stimulates or blocks a community to get together, to enjoy and live in harmony or to fight for your dreams. Themes such as living in the city, the landscape, the use and reappropriation of public space, the sense of community, sociability of sharing and neighborhood life will be explored.
The variety of the different realities represented through the films reflects the cross section of visions, choices and needs of diverse communities, while presenting the value and role of architecture and the social, geographic, cultural and political contexts.

VAFF
Venice Architecture Film Festival is a film festival dedicated to architecture and it is an annual event aimed at recognizing issues relevant to architecture and to the exploration of its anthropological and social implications on our society.
The Festival, entirely conceived and curated by the members of the ArchiTuned cultural association, collects and depicts the experiences of diverse realities, offering a wide overview and a cross-section of real life frames of a cultural context, social developments and dynamics within the inhabited environments.

Program
Entrance from 20:00 to 20:30. All screening events from the 1st to the 5th September at Giardini della Marinaressa will start shortly after ( see more specifics directly on the official website.
Participation in the screening evenings is admission free with reservations required and with the Green Pass – covid-19 Certificate, in compliance with the Legislative Decree no. 105 of July 23rd, 2021.

Partners and Supporters
European Cultural Centre, Ordine degli Architetti PPC Venezia, Fondazione dell’Ordine degli Architetti PPC di Venezia, CrazyBit, Assicurazioni Generali, UniCredit, Domodry, cnt-apps Research Project, UniSVe, Iskra Restauri, Clementson Travel Office, Select, Bar Al Vecio Calice, Antica Murano, A-Office, Oblò Architetti, pact, Atelier Architettura Antonio Zanon, marcoferracuti.it
Media Partners: Domus, Venews.

Twenty Short Films have been selected for the final phase of the Communities Competition.
Below you can find some additional information on the films screened during the five days of the festival at the Giardino della Marinaressa.

ASCONA shows a place that seems to have fallen out of time, that has not changed since the 1950s but still exists. A miniature golf course becomes a social analysis analogy.
ASCONA shows protagonists who with dry humour describe the beginnings and difficulties of the course and the sport - between leisure and professional sport. Reflecting the conversatism of the 1950s ASCONA features a cross-section of society.

Duration: 00:15:00 By Julius Dommer

A documentary film about the meaning of being Mexican

Duration: 00:11:00 By Mario Orozco

"Gone" is an experimental documentary filmed in April and May 2020 in Oslo, Norway. The film is a reaction to the national shock after the country went into lockdown on the 12th of March. The audience is invited on a contemplative journey through Oslo where the city's emptiness and human insignificance are focal points.

Duration: 00:06:17 By Anika Salvesen

Memories of a Mexican town flooded by the government seventy years ago.

Duration: 00:16:14 By Giorgio Rossentino

A never before seen look into the mysterious world of the Iceberg Licking Society as the association faces iceberg-licking's greatest threat: global warming.

Duration: 00:04:40 By Nathan Ceddia

The alleyways (hems) of District 4, Saigon, reflect more than their hard urban construction. They are reflection of a culture based on family and community. This film is part of a continuing series of experimental visual explorations of District 4, that use post-production manipulation as a tool to mediate a local context, through the lens of western filmmaker. The film focuses on the space around an oc (sea snails) seller, located in a tightly packed alleyway, located in the middle of the district. The wider narrative is one of a complex, layered and intricate interplay between family and community operating in a space that acts as an extension to the house, a playground, cafe, food court, and communal meeting place. These uses are tempered by the continual flow pedestrian and motorcycle traffic; a reminder of a world beyond the alley. The soundscape is developed by sound artist Thierry Bernard-Gotteland, and utilises site specific audio recordings, that have been developed to counter the continuous flow of noise that characterises these alleys.

Duration: 00:05:00 - By Andrew Stiff

A journey inside the mind of a young girl becoming a new yorker. Also a meditation on urban alienation and how the everyone's life is affected by the buildings.

Duration: 00:4:16 By Matteo D'Argenio

Two coincidences, one geographical - the region of the city of Cunha, en the state of Sao Paulo - and other material - the use of clay bricks - motivate the interest of three architectural offices (Ar arquitetos, Arquipelago and Messina Rivas) for documenting procedures of land transformation, a primary raw material, into local vernacular resources involved in the construction process of three arquitectural projects. In the exercise of re-imagining how everyday life shapes the designing practice, the propose is to reveal the working protocols of Zé Tabuinha and Burrico, two potters from the Cunha región, reflecting on the possible intertwining of everyday life and bodies that are interdependent in the construction process os a project.

Duration: 00:15:00 By Federico Cairoli

A desperate worker returns to the abandoned streets of the Milanese suburbs where he worked.
A tribute to "The Last Man on Earth", science fiction horror with Vincent Price

Duration: 00:05:49 By Nino Pescecane

The secret life of a street known to most from its numerous appearances in movies, television shows and commercials.

Lower Grand chronicles the uneven recovery after the Great Recession through the aspect of this unique setting. Depending which side you're on, its portals are a window on the upper crust of American society or its lower depths.

Duration: 00:10:00 By Jeff Dorer

Duration: 00:11:00 By Nicholas Hooper H., Valentina Sanz

Today's, Guaraní territory has more than 280,000 people, united by a common language and culture, distributed in 1,416 communities in South America.
In the Province of Misiones, Argentina, the Guaraní population exceeds 10,000 inhabitants distributed in 120 communities.
The fight for the recognition of Indigenous Rights is constant and tireless. His determined defense of the environment is due to the fact that nowadays the lack of forest brings food care, difficulties with religious practices and the impossibility of self-sufficiency.
Ocuyrey, the Community Centre (Guaraní name with which the community baptized the construction) is partly a temple, pavilion, a space for communion, a building that reflects the dialogue between ancestral, popular, and academic knowledge, contributing to the civic and spiritual union of the community, trying to contribute to the empowerment of the community through a common, replicable and sustainable project that reinforces and conserves its ecosystem, its culture and contributes to social and community well-being. The building goes into the jungle: the location is defined by the community as a space for contemplating nature, a door to the jungle, a way of projecting the future.

Duration: 00:13:41 By Federico Cairoli

The renowned Italian architect Italo Rota has been collecting objects, expressions of the city and urban development, all his life. His collection includes an unspecified number of pieces, stored in his Milan home and in a warehouse. Rota himself does not actually know how many items he owns, but he estimates over one hundred thousand. More than a collection, it is an assemblage of books, popular objects and rare works of art. In 2021 a selection of Rota's pieces were exhibited in Lucca in the exhibition "Pianeta città", organised by the Ragghianti Foundation.
The documentary collects Italo Rota's testimony on the meaning of his collecting and on the use of objects as instruments for knowledge.

Duration: 00:18:41 By Eleonora Mastropietro

The short film "Seductive Living Space" is the attempt to frame, from the point of view of interiority, a visual, sound and poetic story about the relationship between the human being and the environment through the architecture.
The seduction is a process that begine frome the outside, it crosses our minds and it can interacts with our thoughts and actions. Wherever we are, the shapes of the world comunicates with us. When we stay in a place we can feel its seduction through the stories, the smells, the sounds and the taste of the spaces it is made of. All these sensorial and cultural inputs are like a food for our body such as for our mind and this is the reason way we thake care of our houses, the places where we spend the most of the time are shells for the memories, for the inner moments and for the dreams.

Duration: 00:7:38 By Maria Luisa Priori

Spacial Ritual is sensitive film trying to show ironically how architects would like to see their own projects experienced by users.

Duration: 00:04:03 By Lucas Bacle

Liquid City is a love letter to the process and products of thoughtful intervention in the built-environment, as well as to the city, people, and larger context in which we work, live, play and operate. Every process or structure we create is temporary, evolving and refining infinitely over time. Liquid City is a meditation on architecture as an examination of, and response to, contemporary culture, as well as a celebration of the liquidity of new ideas and approaches to design and construction, and the maddening challenges, shifting trends and requirements, and inspiring opportunities that drive us to create.The film looks beyond the finished product and takes a more contemplative look at the details; interacting with the process and elements that make up the whole which we so often overlook. In this way, the film offers a rare and much-needed glimpse into the soul, not just of a building, but of the architect.

Duration: 00:10:00 By Jesse Pickett

At various times during the 60s and the l’70s,
the urgency of the struggle triggered “a cinema right now”,
underground as well as militant, experimental as much as documentary.
That immediate cinema, joyful and conspiratorial, intended to upset the cinematic shapes,
its narrow boundaries and its productive logics,
as well as to tell otherwise the alternative forms of human inhabitancy.
Thirty-seven movies for a home is a visual essay made of film shreds and videotape flats,
of fighting women and building speculators, of criticism and action.

This short movie is also the fifth chapter of
TOWARDS A COUNTER HISTORY OF ITALIAN CINEMA
(a collective video essay about underground movies, a journey in images through the secret history of Italian film, organised by Chiara Grizzafi and Filmidee)

Duration: 00:11:00 - By Arianna Lodeserto

Ivory Tower is an experimental short documentary film of combined sound and images of labor protest of South-East Asian migrant workers in Taipei. The windows from the historical village of Taoyuan represent the realities and disconnection of some Taiwanese about labor rights issues today. As the resounding collective voices of the laborers transform into a solid force, there’s no reason not to act.

Duration: 00:04:00 By Richard Soriano Legaspi

Film set in the neighborhood of Copacabana, elaborated through a collage of current and archive images (Super 8 and digital). An experimental work narrated by the significant speech of the poet Fausto Fawcett, and sonorized by the musician Arnaldo Brandão.

Duration: 00:13:33 By Marcos Bonisson, Khalil Charif

I explore the wall ranging from building material to a psychological wall, and how it affects our behavior, movement, and way of thinking. During my research, there have been many shifts in my relationship with the wall. It was a process to discover this object that is inevitably and tightly weaved into our lives. My perspective has changed several times, from seeing this object as a symbol of limitation, creating simultaneously a stronger mental wall bringing me an urge to break down what creates the disconnection between us, to realize that at the same time how much it has become fundamental in our lives in terms of giving a definition to space and creating interior space where we have spent more and more time within. Now, I am reaching a point where I am rediscovering the potential of a wall as an object that is in fact creating connections and relationships, and making passageways on the horizon of overflowing possibilities.

Through interior monologue and conversations and various media, I attempt to reveal the experiences of confrontations and connections around walls which we all share. It is a journey of exploring its complexity and discovering it as a living material that is not just rigid nor solid, but rather that it is fluid, ever-changing, like an organism.

Duration: 00:11:47 By Y-ul Suh