INTERVIEW: ADFF Founder Kyle Bergman Invites You to Revel in Architecture Films All This Week!
Attention all film, architecture and architecture film buffs! This week marks the start of the seventh annual Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF). For six glorious days, from October 13th-18th, New Yorkers are invited to enjoy more than 30 feature-length and short films centered on, you guessed it, architecture and design. While many of you may be thinking that watching a two-plus hour movie about a building is a guaranteed snoozer, ADFF’s Kyle Bergman would most definitely argue otherwise. We recently caught up with the festival founder and architect who turned the once five-film gathering into a multi-city phenomenon that has captured the eyes, ears and hearts of not just design professionals, but folks from all walks of life looking to be inspired and moved by great cinema. Learn more about how the festival came to be and what’s in store for this year’s ADFF ahead.
6sqft: What inspired you to start the Architecture and Design Film Festival?
Kyle: Before I was in architecture school, when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, I was playing with the idea of doing some film making classes and some architecture classes. At the time I picked architecture, but ADFF has brought me back full circle to where I’m doing both.
In many ways the two fields are very similar, particularly how the work is produced. For me it just seemed like a natural fit. For example, even though you have a Richard Meier building, there are thousands of people who work on that. On a Scorsese film, the director is just one person at the top of a huge chain of people. The two industries are collaborative and they’re also both public because you do buildings, you do films, and they’re seen in the public. Architecture and film are also modes of storytelling. In film it’s more obvious, but a building also has a narrative; every decision you make, what brick you pick out or what area you’re going to use wood or steel, the scale and proportion…all of it, really.
I also think films are just a great way to increase the dialogue about a certain area and subject matter. As architects, we kind of talk to ourselves a lot all the time and film is a way to expand the conversation between the professional design community and a larger audience, which I think is good for everyone.
6sqft: How has the program changed since you started it in 2009?
Kyle: This is our seventh year. We preview more and more films each year, and I think that’s for a lot of reasons. I think people are seeing that because there’s this festival and other architecture and design film festivals out there in Europe and around the world, this is something to focus on. But I also think that there’s more and more good documentaries being made. So we have a wider range of films to choose from every year.
6sqft: Is there film you really look forward to screening this year?
Kyle: It’s hard to pick a favorite only because when you program a festival, it’s kind of like planning a meal for a lot of people. You have a lot of different films that kind of work for public interest. So there are no favorites.
Some of the highlights I would say include two by this couple called Beka, made up of Louise Lemoine and Ila Beka, and they’re about housing. One of them is called “The Infinite Happiness” which is our opening night film about the Bjarke Ingels project in Copenhagen named 8 Housing. Their other film is called “Barbicania.” They did that about two years ago about the Barbican Centre in London. Both are really interesting because they’re looking at architecture through how people use the spaces through a series of vignettes that together really give you a sense of what these buildings are like.
There’s also a great film called “Strange and Familiar” about the architecture on Fogo Island. It’s an amazing story about a small island off of Newfoundland in Canada and this woman who grew up there and came back many, many years later to help develop the island. It was struggling to become an international art center, but they did it by bringing in artists from around the world to inspire and be inspired by the people who live there. They had this great young Norwegian architect come and build these super modern buildings in this very rural, rustic landscape. It’s a wonderful story of community and architecture.