Dan Slevin recommends you check out one of his favourite annual big screen events.
A soldier guards the last male white rhino in the world - they are "functionally" extinct - in the film Anthhropocene. Photo: Supplied
The days are getting shorter which means it’s time for those long winter evenings to be filled with film festivals.
One of my favourite annual events is the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival (which opens in Auckland this weekend). All decent film festivals should be mentally stimulating, of course, but this is the one where I feel that I am in the presence of the biggest brains. The festival kindly gave me early access to a couple of their bigger offers and wonderful (if flawed) they both were.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is one of the festival’s biggest ‘gets’ as Manufactured Landscapes and Watermarks, earlier works by co-director Jennifer Baichwal, were global festival smash hits and the new film (made with Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky) has already wowed big screen audiences at Toronto, Sundance, Berlin and other major festivals.
The Kenyan government symbolically burns millions of dollars worth of confiscated elephant tusks destined for rich collectors (from the Anthropocene: The human Epoch). Photo: Supplied
The premise of the picture is that we are now in the global era where human beings are the greatest impact on the planet (as opposed to, say, an Ice Age) – a campaign to have this recognised formally is being waged by many scientists worldwide at the moment and the film is a part of that campaign.
Filmed in dozens of countries around the world, with literally breath-taking aerial photography, the filmmakers look at the myriad ways in which we scar, gouge, strip, mine and terraform the earth. Sometimes I wished for a little more actual information about what I was watching and what the context was as there are long periods where the hypnotic images are left to do all the work and some of the amazing images I think work a little counter to the manifesto as they make humanity seem like a pretty cool inventor of astonishing machines. The giant diggers at the open cast mine in Germany must have been the inspiration for the mobile devouring cities in Mortal Engines.
Bauhaus Spirit is a history of the famous modernist German design school which Walter Gropius founded in 1919 in Weimar. Celebrating the centenary, the film goes back and forth between the past and the present to show how the principles that came from Bauhaus are still being used today in projects all over the world. Not knowing a huge amount about Bauhaus (I was only vaguely aware that it was actually a school and not some kind of collective although it was that too…) is an advantage and – as is so often the case with these Architecture & Design films – the photography itself contributes so much to the storytelling. Drone footage has become a bit of old hat in most documentaries but it really is a wonderful way to access the exterior of buildings in unique and effective ways.
Photo: Supplied
Bauhaus Spirit loses its way in the final third when it doesn’t do such a good job of tying current innovations back to the Bauhaus ideals but those modern projects – like the elevated gymnasium project in one of the barrios of Medellin in Colombia – are fascinating in and of themselves.
The festival also features the usual mix of ‘great man biographies’ – Frank Lloyd Wright, Dieter Rams – and charged political arguments where we see designers taking up the challenge of dreaming up a future or repairing the damage of the past – low cost housing, food waste, urban planning.
The 2019 Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival is now on in at Rialto Cinemas in Auckland and then moves to Wellington (23 May – 9 June) and Dunedin (13-23 June), Christchurch (27 June – 10 July). A cut-down version will also play Havelock North (13-19 June) and New Plymouth (20-26 June).
