The selection has been created thanks to the collaboration with a larger network of professionals in the field. For the 2021 festival we will present films in cooperation with the Canadian Centre of Architecture, BARQFestival, Move Cine Arte.

Yerevan, capital of Armenia. 230 meters underground, in the Avan salt mine, men and women walk to breathe easier. Physical activities and medical consultations set the rhythm of the timeless world of this underground clinic, where lives intersect and stories are told.

by Hovig Hagopian –  21’

Midway features improvisations on the ROLI Seaboard Rise by the residents of Midway House, a 76-flat council estate in Islington with a diverse demographic, ranging from young professionals and students, to council-renting families and elderly inhabitants who moved in the day the building opened in the late 1970s. The keyboard was loaded with pitched sounds recorded on the estate itself.

by Marco Alessi –  30’

Pop interiors, psychic drifts, the myths of mass holidays seen from the skyscraper of Rimini, one of the symbolic buildings of the city. 100 meters high, inaugurated in 1959 as an icon of a town that was turning into a seaside metropolis, considered by some an eco-monster and by others a technological paradise, today it is a vertical district inhabited by about twenty different nationalities. Its humanity and its landscapes are scrutinized in first person by one of its inhabitants, in open dialogue with the skyscraper itself (to which Ermanno Cavazzoni, Federico Fellini's latest screenwriter, gives voice). An autobiographical reflection that questions the forms of the contemporary documentary.

by Marco Bertozzi – 100’

What does it mean to live in the city without a place you can call your own? What role can architects have in addressing homelessness? And how can cities become better homes for all? The short documentary film What It Takes to Make a Home follows a conversation between architects Michael Maltzan (Los Angeles) and Alexander Hagner (Vienna), who have been grappling with these questions over many years and through various projects. While the cities and the political and economic contexts in which Maltzan and Hagner work differ, both search for long-term strategies for housing instead of reacting with ad hoc solutions. Focussing on some causes and conditions of homelessness, the film questions the role architects can play toward overcoming the stigmatization of people experiencing it, in order to build more inclusive cities. This film is the first in a three-part short documentary series conceived by CCA Director Giovanna Barasi, and directed by Daniel Schwartz. The films explore intersecting conditions—loneliness, migration, segregation, and ageing—that are reconfiguring cities today.

by Daniel Schwarz, conceived by Giovanna Borasi – 30’

“Wilkommen, bienvenue,” the CEO sang in 2011 when BIG won the architecture competition for a large waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope on top. A camera has followed the process since the tentative beginnings of what became known – from the very first sod cut – as a visionary project that combines waste management and infrastructure with spectacular architecture and a recreational urban space.
But it is going to be an uphill struggle ...
The challenges soon pile up along with questions: How do you even combine a waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope? How far is a property developer willing to go? And how much can an architect actually push through when all is said and done?
In a cinematic construction site symphony, we follow our main characters from the popping of champagne corks and the vision taking off, through broken dreams about smoke rings and abrasions from artificial snow, to the first trip down the black slope.

by Rikke Selin Fokdal, Kaspar Astrud Schroeder – 52’