This festival has always been a highlight of Dan Slevin’s cinema year and the latest edition has not let him down.
This year’s Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival could easily be renamed the Resene Optimism Against All Odds Film Festival. While the content of other festivals – and indeed life itself these days – can seem unremittingly gloomy, all three of the films I previewed were so ‘feel good’ I almost skipped out of the screening room afterwards.
By its nature, architecture and design is about creativity and problem solving, something that we desperately need, and the first film has it all in spades.
Photo: Rialto
Greenhouse by Joost follows renowned Australian artist, florist, environmentalist and restauranteur Joost Bakker as he attempts to design and build a totally self-sufficient home (and restaurant) in the heart of Melbourne’s Federation Square. Everything about the building had to be recyclable and also contribute totally to the food and energy needs of the occupants and their guests.
From the obvious – solar panels and batteries – to the less obvious – ‘waste’ product from the tiny fish farm being used as food for the rooftop veggie garden, all either planted or swimming around in reused polyurethane oil drums.
I was very taken with the locally manufactured modular building materials made from waste straw that would otherwise be burnt on farmland or left to biodegrade. Naturally fire-retardant, too.
Joost himself is relentlessly optimistic, despite construction taking place in the middle of the pandemic with regular lockdowns slowing progress to a frustrating degree. One setback was particularly alarming: he arrives on site one morning to see his street-level solar panels strewn with dead bees from the hives he’d installed to produce natural sweetener for all that fine dining. Turns out that some of the colony had been poisoned by pesticides and the dead bees had just been thrown out by the healthy ones who then learnt where not to go for their pollen. A week later and the whole colony had self-corrected.
Joost doesn’t expect everyone to go out and build 100 percent self-sustaining sealed systems like this but there are plenty of ideas in there that we could all take inspiration from. Greenhouse by Joost is an easy film to recommend.
Photo: Rialto
I hadn’t heard of the Canadian architect Richard Henriquez before but after seeing the short biography (Richard Henriquez: Building Stories) it would appear that he’s responsible for most of modern Vancouver. A charming man – born in Jamaica – he has been designing buildings of all shapes and sizes for six decades and his influence on that one city is incomparable.
All architects will tell you that they draw inspiration from the site but Henriquez takes it a step further, asking his buildings to not just draw inspiration from the structures or landscape they replace but construct a narrative of their own that connects the location’s past, present and future, often with some sly wit.
Can buildings tell stories as well as contain stories? Henriquez believes so. Beautifully photographed to do justice to the work, this film made me want to visit Vancouver very badly. It’s just jumped to the top of my travel wishlist.
Photo: Rialto
The third of my previews was not about architecture (or even design in its purest form). The World is Out of Focus is a Danish documentary about four (now elderly) female photographers and how they navigated their creativity through a challenging post-war environment. Else Tholstrup (b. 1929) was making an educational film in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1956 when she stumbled across the set of the film Bridge on the River Kwai and became the behind-the-scenes photographer, falling for the handsome camera operator at the same time. Nanna Bisp Buchert (b. 1937) continues to make challenging collage photos, admitting that if you shoot one new work a day not all of them will be very good but that you have to keep going.
Marianne Engberg (also b. 1937) has perfected the camera obscura – the pinhole camera – and her haunting circular images are among the best you’ll see. Sadly, Tove Kurtzweil (b. 1938) passed away during production but her commitment to the artistic life – and the work of her friends – runs through the whole film.
Each one could probably stand to have a film of their own, but the weaving of their stories helps draw parallels between them that might not otherwise be apparent – not least the surrendering of credit for their work to more high profile male colleagues.
Modernist house in Shreveport, Louisiana, featured in the short documentary Unexpected Modernism, also in the 2023 Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival. Photo: Rialto
The Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival contains nine features and five double-bills of shorter works. It starts in Auckland on 4 May 2023 before traveling across the country to Nelson, Wellington, Dunedin, Christchurch, Havelock North, Tauranga and New Plymouth.
