Heavy Architecture

Beginning at the industrial revolution of the ‘great north’, Jenn Nkiru draws lines between peoples, cities, countries, buildings, movements, bodies and spaces(s) using a mixture of archive materials and new footage. There is little stillness as we are pushed and pulled through Black histories and communities across the city of Manchester and beyond. Nkiru has termed this filmmaking process “cosmic archeology”, and it is grounded in Afro-surrealism, experimental film and the Black arts movement.

The young Portuguese artist Rafa. is facing a turning point in his career, composing, recording and balancing roots and ambitions as he prepares to leave for Leeds and finalize his first EP.

A core group of architects embraced the West Coast from Vancouver to LA with its particular geography and values and left behind a legacy of inspired dwellings. Today, architects celebrate the influence established by their predecessors.

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A documentary film comparing current / everyday and historical / noble aspects of Prague.

This fascinating documentary explores the collaboration between Marion Mahony, the first registered woman architect in the world and the longest serving designer in Frank Lloyd Wright’s practice, and husband Walter Burley Griffin. Their struggle with unyielding bureaucracy, the philosophies that underscored their life and work, and their passionate commitment to an architecture that expressed a balance between society and the environment and an affinity between the human spirit and the natural world. The film weaves together their personal and professional lives, drawing on archival and contemporary footage of their work, an extensive collection of photographs, the couple’s own correspondance and writing, and interviews with prominent architects, social historians and the people who knew them.

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A portrait of the internationally acclaimed Japanese architect who employs Buddhist ideas and western modernism to achieve intercultural architecture.

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All the stories told, all the memories, dreams and lost moments were left in a tank from other generations.

Berlin’s brutalist heritage is under fire. The city’s powerful Charité hospital wants to destroy a brutalist icon of the Cold War era: The infamous former animal research laboratory called the Mäusebunker. Meanwhile, a dedicated group of politicians, preservationists, architects, gallerists, and students fight for an adaptive reuse of these magnificent, uncompromisingly unique structures. Who will win? No matter the outcome, you’re left with the impression that preservation can be brutal.

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Pessac, Quartiers Modernes Frugès: The camera goes from living room to living room, from yard to bath, kitchen to balcony, strolls through a typical day at the row houses built by Le Corbusier in the 20s. This film focuses on the question of how the residents have departed from Le Corbusier’s original concept in the intervening decades so that they feel at home within their own four walls.

A story with almost 100 years told by the 95 years old woman Floripes.

Secluded from view by nine-meter-high walls and composed of 980 buildings, the Forbidden City in Beijing is the largest imperial palace ever built in the world. Three majestic structures form its center and host the city's ceremonies, each of which is considered an architectural masterpiece. In 1406, construction of the Forbidden City was launched at the initiative of one of China's most powerful sovereigns and founder of the Ming dynasty: Yongle. Endowed with divine power, the construction has already resisted more than 200 earthquakes.

Thousands of years before the Inca, a megalithic civilization was founded at Lake Titicaca which spread 500 miles to Cuzco, following a global flood that destroyed the Earth in 9000 BC. Its architects — Viracocha and his seven Shining Ones — disappeared as mysteriously as they appeared, yet the legacy of temples they left behind still baffles the modern mind. Filmed at Tiwanaku, Puma Punku, Cuzco, Quenqo, Saqsayhuaman, Amuru Machay, Quillarumiyoc, Pisac, Tombomachay, Huayna Picchu, Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu, Cutimbo, Silustani and Amaru Meru.

Synthesis of the first 110 years of the history of Portuguese cinema, made almost exclusively with archive material from the series of eight episodes History of Portuguese Cinema, produced by Pedro Efe in 1998, and combining excerpts from films with testimonies from some of the most prominent actors of the same story. It is attempted to relate it chronologically, and in spite of certain gaps, in an accessible, concise and didactic way.

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Rachel Whiteread’s cast of a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End was hailed as one of the greatest public sculptures by an English artist in the twentieth century. Completed in autumn of 1993 and demolished in January 1994, House attracted tens of thousands of visitors and generated impassioned debate, in the local streets, the national press and in the House of Commons.