For many people, the next best thing to creating your own building or work of art is watching how creative people make their own work.
The Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival, now in its 11th year, is back in theatres around the four main centres, as well as Petone and Havelock North, with a slate of films that do just that.
The festival is not just about pretty houses.
New curator Yasmine Ganley and her team at Art Dept have picked treasures that challenge our ideas about design in our lives.
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Yes, there are films about buildings and their makers – a 1960s British modernist homes, a Brazilian brutalist, Swedish urban design, experimental 3D desert buildings, refugee camps and the re-creation of a Polish tractor factory – but the selection then steps across homeware and fabric designers, photo journalists, sculptors, designers and dancers, behind the scenes of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and a nostalgic look at American automat diners.
“There was quite the backlog of films being made that we didn’t get to in 2020 because of Covid,” Ganley said.
The Opera Bastille building was completed by 1989, less than six years after young architect Carlos Ott won the design competition. Photo / Supplied
“A lot of big-hero names have not made work in the past two years. Whether you’re looking at architecture or design, it’s about real human stories.
“While there are architecture film festivals in Berlin, London and New York, we’re quite unique as we opened up a regional circuit, places like Nelson, New Plymouth, Havelock North, which have strong arts communities, artists and makers doing interesting things.”
Ganley said the focus on feature-length films means there are no New Zealand films in the line-up this year but she’d definitely get behind local storytellers.
Her pick for a great story is Building Bastille, about the unknown Canadian architect who accidentally wound up winning the 1983 competition to design Paris’ new Opera Bastille.
Canadian-Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott, 35, was one of three finalists out of 756 anonymous initial projects presented to President François Mitterrand, his work accidentally pushed through because everyone thought it was that of star architect Richard Meier.
The film kicked off when Canadian director Lief Kaldor of Zoot Pictures, who had heard about some original film footage of the project, discovered the film archived in Manitoba. In Paris for another project, he managed to meet Ott and the film began.
The Opera Bastille features luminaries such as Pavarotti, shown here with architect Carlos Ott. Photo / Supplied
“We started in 2018, got some money to shoot some interviews. We filmed the last two interviews in March 2020, we just finished before lockdown,” Kaldor said.
While he saw parallels with the dramas of Sydney Opera House – Danish architect Jørn Utzon's 1957 competition-winning design wasn’t opened until 1973 – Kaldor said Bastille had its own politics: a $500 million project, a crushing architectural challenge and impossible deadline (opening was to be Bastille Day 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution), warring politics and an architect who had never built anything.
“What could go wrong?
“My favourite quote is the director Michael Dittmann [director of the Opera, who created the brief for the building] saying ‘they were stupid’ as they remembered how embarrassed they were they’d picked Ott, they’d thought it was Richard Meier’s work,” he said.
Architect Carlos Ott in the Opera Bastille, Paris. Photo / Supplied
“There were so many layers of stories.”
Ott, now based in Dubai, has since built four or five opera houses, as well as other projects in Uruguay, Shanghai, Paris and New York.
And while Kaldor, Ott and Dittmann are appearing at film festival showings of Building Bastille in Barcelona, Canada and Japan, the film is yet to show in France.
“French politics, still,” admitted Kaldor.
- The Resene Architecture and Design Film festival runs until May 25 in Auckland, with seasons starting Wellington on May 19, Nelson May 26, Dunedin June 2, Christchurch and Havelock North June 9.
