Architecture & Design Film Festival comes to South Asia with ADFF:STIR Mumbai
After its massive success and accolades in North America, the largest film festival dedicated to celebrating architecture and design, ADFF, is making its debut in South Asia in partnership with STIR. With an extraordinary run of over 16 years and counting after originating in New York, the film festival’s South Asia debut will be anchored on the shared storytelling potential of the mediums of design and cinema. ADFF:STIR Mumbai will be presented alongside Kyle Bergman, Director and Founder, ADFF, in the company of Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art New York. Staged to be a novel cross-disciplinary peek into the creative fields in an inclusive format, the festival is all set to take over the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai from January 10-12, 2025, creating tangible intersections and fostering engagement with the wider creative community and enthusiasts alike.
The upcoming festival is made possible through the sheer conviction of collective imagination: of practitioners, professionals, students, and aficionados; bringing together the best of design, innovation, dialogue and radical positions of thinking about our built environment and society. Following months of planning alongside Bergman and a successful curtain raiser event for ADFF in Mumbai earlier this year, the design event seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the changing paradigms of creative production in the region. Apropos, the line-up of films being presented, pavilions, talks and other special projects at ADFF:STIR Mumbai are what make the programme truly unique.
Over 20 international films dedicated to architecture and design are scheduled to be screened during the festival, some marking their debut in South Asia through the event. A vibrant pavilion park will be presented through the support of JSW, hosting architectural pavilions by globally renowned architects and designers. Each of the designs responds to a curatorial brief through site-specific installations that will become tools to contextualise the site for diverse audiences. Additionally, a meticulously curated public programme facilitates wider perspectives and intimate encounters through book readings, crits, performances, workshops and a talks schedule in a novel format, presented under the moniker ~log(ue).
“At STIR, the goal has always been to underscore the interdependent nature of the creative fields across visual culture, performance arts, design and architecture. Architecture is influenced by and influences other disciplines, and among them, film is a prime example. Offering a setting for telling stories and by itself being a storytelling medium, architecture is intrinsically connected to the cinematic realm,” mentions Amit Gupta, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, STIR, at the outset of the festival. “Both architecture and film shape our conscious and social collective and in turn fuel cultural discourse. Conduits such as the ADFF:STIR festival merely bring this fundamental relationship to the fore, nurturing the interconnections between the two, offering fodder for the intellect as well as our imagination”, he concludes.