Architects of imagination _{by Isabella Smith}

The Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival is celebrating its 15^th year of screenings with its most ambitious programme yet. RADFF over the years has grown into a nationwide event and one of the largest architecture and design festivals in the world, showcasing the latest and most captivating films of the genre to Aotearoa audiences.

The festival will take place between the 14^th of May and the 1^st of June in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, with films showing at the Embassy Theatre and Light House Cuba.

Featuring 23 feature films and five shorts from nine countries, Curator Yasmine Ganley says the lineup is full of dynamic and thought-provoking films. “Innovation, sustainability, and artistic expression are notions that run through this year’s thematic pods: Building for the Community, The Domestic Experience, Light as Form, and Hand-Crafted Worlds.”

A selection of films demonstrate Aotearoa’s creative energy, including Parallel Universe: The Art and Design of Roy Good, a rare figure in New Zealand art; the short film Rimurapa by Neil Pardington about the local artist who creates graphic works from bull kelp; The Temple of Kinetic Resonance, providing a look at modernist filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye; and The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens, a wander through the Hamilton gardens from its meagre beginnings as a rubbish dump to what is now recognised as one of the great gardens of the world.

Other festival highlights include Stardust: A Story of Love and Architecture about the architectural couple Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, spanning decades of their remarkable creative partnership that ignited a quiet revolution in architecture. Both Prickly Mountain and My Design/Build life and The Harvard 5: a story of love, architecture, and a design revolution too deal in themes of counter-cultural and experimental architecture and design in the United States.

For the first time the festival features historical autobiographical dramas, including The Great Arch which describes the remarkable true story of Danish architect Johan Otto Spreckelsen and the creation of Paris’ monumental Grande Arche, and a dreamlike imagining of British Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington in Leonora In The Morning Light, which features scenes in Xilitla, the site of British arts patron Edward James’ surrealist sculptural garden in Mexico.

Photographers are celebrated in Anna Mariani Photographic Notes and Peter Hujar’s Day. The former retraces the dirt roads taken by the photographer Anna Mariani, exploring the unique architecture of the Brazilian northeastern hinterland. The latter brings to life rediscovered transcripts from photographer Peter Hujar as he describes in minute detail the events of the previous day.

From Bauhaus to Art Nouveau, Netherlands to Antarctica, space to light, the festival offers a panoramic view of architectural evolution, providing insights into the brilliant minds and movements that have stretched the possibilities of imagination and shaped the world.