Irish designer Eileen Gray built a refuge on the Côte d‘Azur in 1929. Her first house is a discrete, avant-garde masterpiece. She named it E.1027, a cryptic marriage of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it. Le Corbusier, upon discovering the house, became intrigued and obsessed. He later covered the walls with murals and published photos of them. Gray described these paintings as vandalism and demanded restitution. He ignored her wishes and instead built his famous Cabanon directly behind E.1027, which dominates the narrative of the site to this day. This is a story about the power of one woman’s creative expression and a man’s desire to control it.

In the neighborhood of Manshiyat Nasr in Cairo, the community of Zaraeeb collected the city’s trash for decades and developed the most efficient and highly profitable recycling system in the world. Still, the place is often perceived as dirty, marginalized, and segregated. Tunisian artist eL Seed and his team responded to this perception by creating an anamorphic sculpture that covers almost 50 buildings and is visible from Moqattam Mountain. The piece of art references Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, a Coptic Bishop from the 3rd century who said, “Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first.”

Ada Karmi-Melamede is one of the most accomplished female architects in the world, but very little is known about her outside her home country of Israel. Ada – My Mother the Architect is a deeply moving portrait of an extraordinary woman directed by her daughter, filmmaker and former architect Yael Melamede. Ada is a true pioneer who, like many successful working mothers of her time, was forced to make impossible choices.

Living Together follows a group of young people during the creation of a housing cooperative that aims to be sustainable, social, and affordable. The project is ambitious. Not only is it the first of its kind in the Netherlands, but the group of young residential pioneers has the added challenge of having no house-building experience. Follow the housing pioneers from their festival-planning roots as KONIJN to their permaculture farm in Portugal and eventually to the creation of De Warren.

* This film screens with Where We Grow Older.

Where will you live as you age? Will your city take care of you? How should we design for the elderly, and for those who care for them? Where We Grow Older looks at how the growing aging population is reshaping architectural and social constructs, and questions the role of urban design and politics in facing these challenges. The film takes us to projects in Barcelona and Baltimore, showing two vastly different contexts for exploring the same fundamental question.

* This film screens with Living Together: The Story of De Warren.

Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is an intimate portrait of two of the most influential architects of the last century.  Filmed over a decade by their son, Stardust, follows ‘Bob and Denise’ in a (tragi-comic) road movie across continents, as they look back to the events and buildings that inspired a partnership and love affair of over half a century. Always holding hands, whether in their most famous building, the Sainsbury Wing of the National gallery, or while watching British sitcoms, we share their secrets and loves.

The Pavilion On The Water is a cinematic journey into the world of Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa and his passion for Japanese culture. Japan, to Scarpa, was an inspirational universe. It is also the place where he eventually died in 1978, at the height of his career, while retracing the steps of wandering poet Matsuo Bashō. Through the words of Japanese philosopher Ryosuke Ōhashi, this film reflects on the sense of beauty as it brings together Scarpa’s work and Japanese traditional aesthetic.

Austrian-born and educated, R.M. Schindler laid the foundation for what is now considered the California lifestyle of indoor-outdoor living. This documentary explores his richly complex work, with its influences from the turn of the 20th century Vienna, the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the pueblos of Taos. It is an investigation into Schindler’s philosophy of Space Architecture as contrasted with the International Style that ruled modern architecture during most of the architect’s life.

*Beauty Between the Lines* delves into the life and work of Arthur Erickson, a visionary architect first in Canada and ultimately throughout the world. With intimate interviews, unseen archival footage, and a exploration of his architectural masterpieces, the film weaves together the complexities of Erickson’s personal and professional life. It reveals a man who transcended traditional boundaries, who fused art, culture, and nature and in the process, redefined modern architecture.