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Humanity in Architecture Film Festival

Saturday, January 25, 2025, 10:00 am - 7:45 pm

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hosted in collaboration with Architecture & Design Film Festival

a weekend of films, conversations, and more celebrating architecture’s impact on people and communities

Join us for a weekend of films exploring the built environment’s power to enrich our human experience and to remind us of our capacity to create positive change in the world.

Our opening night premiere of Strange & Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island will be followed by a dialogue between visionary Zita Cobb and Grace Farms CEO and Founder Sharon Prince, alongside Kyle Bergman, Festival Director & Founder of Architecture & Design Film Festival, and Toshihiro Oki, Grace Farms Architecture Advisor.

On Saturday, enjoy a full day of films amplifying our longstanding belief that architecture moves us and inspires us to address the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time.

 

Friday, January 24

Strange & Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island (6:30 – 8:15 pm)

 

Saturday, January 25

Biocentrics (10:30 am – 12:20 pm)
Beyond Zero (10:40 am – 12:15 pm)
Charlotte Perriand, Pioneer in the Art of Living (10:50 am – 11:50 am)

Unfinished Spaces (12:30 – 2:15 pm)
Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf (12:40 – 2:15 pm)
Moriyama-San (12:50 – 2 pm)

Sitting Still with Laurie Olin (3 – 4:50 pm)
Frank Gehry: Building Justice (3:10 – 4:40 pm)
Perception (3:20 – 4:30 pm)

Tokyo Ride (5:45 – 7:45 pm)

 

 

Details

Date:
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Time:
10:00 am - 7:45 pm
Series:
Humanity in Architecture Film Festival
Event Categories:
Location:
Grace Farms, CT

Ticket Prices

$10 to $15 per film
Register
Register

Learn More about the Films

Strange and Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island

Year: 2015 | Runtime: 52 minutes | Directors: Marcia Connolly & Katherine Knight

In a rapidly urbanizing world, what does the future hold for traditional rural communities? On Fogo Island, a remote enclave off the coast of Newfoundland, the collapse of the cod fishing industry threatens to erode the island’s way of life. In response, architect Todd Saunders and social entrepreneur Zita Cobb join forces to create bold, innovative architecture that serves as a catalyst for social transformation. This visually stunning documentary takes viewers to the heart of Fogo Island, where locals collaborate with Saunders and Cobb to design and build an inn for contemporary artists. The film showcases a community’s perseverance to create “new things with old ways.”

Zita Cobb, CM

Shorefast CEO and Co-founder

Zita Cobb was born on Fogo Island in 1958, part of the eighth generation in her family to call the island home. Forced to leave after the collapse of the inshore cod fishery, she and her family ended up in Ontario, Canada where she studied business in Ottawa. Following a subsequent successful career in high-tech, Zita returned to Fogo Island and established Shorefast in 2004 with two of her siblings, Alan and Anthony Cobb. The story of her early life inspired the National Film Board of Canada’s immersive, interactive film in 2021 called Far Away from Far Away.

Sharon Prince

Grace Farms CEO and Founder

Sharon Prince is the CEO and Founder of Grace Farms Foundation, a new kind of boundary-defying public space that advances good locally and globally. Prince commissioned Pritzker Prize-winning SANAA architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa to design Grace Farms, which has become widely known as a global humanitarian and cultural center located in New Canaan, Connecticut. Since opening, Grace Farms has garnered numerous prestigious awards for contributions to architecture, environmental sustainability, and social good, including the AIA National 2017 Architecture Honor Award and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize.

Biocentrics

Year: 2022 | Runtime: 108 minutes | Directors: Fernanda Heinz Figueiredo and Ataliba Benaim

Through the eyes and voice of biologist Janine Benyus, the non-fiction feature Biocentrics takes the viewer through different corners of the planet to reveal the birth and the principles that guide biomimicry, a methodology of innovation inspired by nature. As a hub connecting ancestral knowledge, diverse cultures, natural technologies and initiatives that choose the continuity of life as their premise, the charismatic activist proposes a common agenda, a new posture and a tool, which is the vanguard of contemporary science, to face the global challenges that lie ahead and putting life back at the center of decision-making.

Beyond Zero

Year: 2020 | Runtime: 75 minutes | Director: Nathan Havey

After a life-changing epiphany, the CEO of a global public company embarks on a high-stakes quest to eliminate all negative environmental impacts by 2020. To succeed, they must overcome deep skepticism, abandon the status quo, and ignite a new industrial revolution. Beyond Zero offers an inspirational roadmap for how business can reverse climate change. “Beyond Zero tells a powerful and hugely hopeful story about what it means to build a business around restoring the earth and just why we must reimagine capitalism to heal the world — and ourselves. Don’t just see this movie, bring its lessons into your company, and fast.” - Rebecca Henderson, Professor at Harvard Business School and Author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

Charlotte Perriand: Pioneer in the Art of Living

Year: 2019 | Runtime: 52 minutes | Director: Stéphane Ghez

The designer and architect Charlotte Perriand was a highly creative figure who left her mark on the 20th century. Free-spirited and politically engaged, she designed revolutionary furnishings and participated in the invention of modern dwellings that were in harmony with both their inhabitants and their environment. From her avant-garde battles alongside Le Corbusier in the 1930s to her experience in Japan and affirmation of a lifestyle based on openness and flexibility, this film, in the the shape of a notebook of memories, gives us an up-close and personal look at a life filled with passion and creativity, and opens us to reflections about contemporary society, as seen through the eyes of an exceptional figure.

Unfinished Spaces

Year: 2011 | Runtime: 86 minutes | Directors: Benjamin Murray & Alysa Nahmias

Cuba's ambitious National Art Schools project, designed by three young artists in the wake of Castro's Revolution, is neglected, nearly forgotten, then ultimately rediscovered as a visionary architectural masterpiece.

Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf

Year: 2018 | Runtime: 75 minutes | Director: Tom Piper

Revolutionary landscape designer Piet Oudolf is known for designing public works like New York City’s popular High Line and the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park that redefine our conception of gardens as works of art in themselves. This gorgeous, meditative documentary immerses viewers in his work, taking us inside Oudolf’s creative process. From his aesthetic theories to his strikingly abstract sketches to the ecological implications of his ideas, the film poetically reveals how Oudolf upends conventional notions of nature, public space, and, ultimately, beauty itself.

Moriyama-San

Year: 2017 | Runtime: 63 minutes | Directors: Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine

One week in the extraordinary-ordinary life of Mr. Moriyama, a Japanese art, architecture and music enlighted amateur who lives in one of the most famous contemporary Japanese architecture, the Moriyama house, built in Tokyo in 2005 by Pritzker-prize winner Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). Introduced in the intimacy of this experimental microcosm which redefines completely the common sense of domestic life, Ila Bêka recounts in a very spontaneous and personal way the unique personality of the owner: a urban hermit living in a small archipelago of peace and contemplation in the heart of Tokyo. From noise music to experimental movies, the film let us enter into the ramification of the Mr. Moriyama's free spirit.

Sitting Still with Laurie Olin

Year: 2024 | Runtime: 90 minutes | Director: Gina Angelone

Sitting Still captures the compelling world view of Laurie Olin, a gregarious, immensely knowledgeable, endlessly curious, and irreverent urban visionary whose humanist approach to design has helped define the modern-day city. Olin’s life story of growing up in Alaska on the edge of the American frontier, living abroad and challenging belief systems around designing in nature, and his lifelong work transforming environments for social good become the launching pad for exploring critical themes around the sociology of public spaces and how they directly impact our human experience. The film gives voice to the environmental and social concerns that have driven Olin's vision for more 50 years and affected our collective humanity like no other moment in history. Sitting Still also includes interviews with architects Frank Gehry and Billie Tsien, and esteemed landscape architect and artist, Walter Hood, among others.

Frank Gehry: Building Justice

Year: 2018 | Runtime: 70 minutes | Director: Ultan Guilfoyle

This inspiring documentary, connecting architecture with social policy, follows the legendary architect Frank Gehry as he sets out to answer whether there is a better way to design prisons. Collaborating with architecture students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Yale School of Architecture, former inmates, and prison experts, Gehry and his colleagues grapple with complex social, political, emotional, structural, and aesthetic challenges to re-envision the future of incarceration. Together, they explore all aspects of prison design, learning first-hand the design flaws of prison life from women who have been incarcerated in the worst prisons in all of the United States. Frank Gehry: Building Justice examines both the American criminal justice system and the issue of prison design through architecture students' point of view, as they look into the future of American incarceration policy.

Perception

Year: 2019 | Runtime: 59 minutes | Director: eL Seed

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.

Tokyo Ride

Year: 2020 | Runtime: 90 minutes | Directors: Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine

After the multi awarded Moriyama San, Tokyo Ride is a new step of Bêka & Lemoine's immersion within Tokyo's busy daily life. Revisiting the genre of the road movie in a very diaristic and personal way, the film takes us on board of Ryue Nishizawa's vintage Alfa Romeo for a day long wandering in the streets of Tokyo. More than a portrait, in the classical sense, of one of the most talented and celebrated Japanese architect of today, the film renders in its pure spontaneity the experience of this friendly urban drift. Ryue Nishizawa narrates along the way his strong relationship with his home town through some sites he personally affectionates, buildings that have influenced him, and some of his own architecture projects. The film questions how rooted architecture practice is and how much the built and cultural environment feeds and shapes our imagination.

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