This year, we present a new film cycle specifically dedicated to films and documentaries about design, created by different directors or by designers. This cycle articulates a perspective more focussed on the discipline of design, with a clear informative and educational vocation, and is co-curated by Sofia Mourato, following the invitation by “Do You Mean Architecture”.

Two of the world’s most influential designers, Lella and Massimo Vignelli’s work covers such a broad spectrum that one could say they are known by everyone, even by those who don’t know their names.  Adhering to self-proclaimed motto, “If you can’t find it, design it,” their achievements in industrial and product design, graphic and publication design, corporate identity, architectural graphics, and exhibition, interior, and furniture design have earned worldwide respect and numerous international awards for over 40 years.

A story of whimsical innovation and the drive to create a new civilization on the scrapheap of a wasteful society.Often cited as the first rural commune of the 1960s, Drop City was an experimental community on the plains of Southern Colorado that blended practices of art, architecture, and resourceful living in ways that came to define a global counterculture.

How do we fully engage organizations to think about the changing landscape of business, culture and society? Inspired by design thinking, this documentary grabs businessman, designers, social change-makers and individuals to portrait what they have in common when facing this ambiguous 21st century. What is design thinking? How is it applied in business models? How are people changing the world with their own creative minds? It is a call to the conventional minds to change and collaborate.

One in six Romanians has gone abroad to work. Most of them come from rural areas and the money sent back home has irreversibly transformed their native villages. Unlike in the city, where even competition is experienced and perceived individually and behind closed doors, changes are highly more visible in villages, where the main street is open stage to social competition.

Influenced by the writing of her father, Marc Gobé (Emotional Branding), this new director brings energy and urgency to stories of people around the world fighting to reclaim their public spaces from visual pollution. From 240 hours of film, 160 interviews, and visits to 11 countries on five continents, This Space Available charts a fascinating variety of struggles against unchecked advertising and suggests that more than aesthetics is at stake.

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film since their death dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

Documentary film on the Mutoid Waste Company camp build in Santarcangelo in 1990, it is produced with the participation of its inhabitants and of Santarcangelo •13. “Mutonia” is a singularity in what concerns the concept of community, way of living, relationship with the land, cultural history and field-testing. ZimmerFrei’s film goes through the camp and settles there, bringing out the complexity, the originality, the fragility, the communal history and the individual personalities. “Hometown” is a village within the village, a temporary city in perennial transformation, related to a wider landscape, which is urban, rural, social and lively.

Upon its completion in October 1958, the Union Tank Car Dome, located north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the largest clear-span structure in the world. Based on the engineering principles of the visionary design scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, this geodesic dome was, at 384 feet in diameter, the first large scale example of this building type. A Necessary Ruin relates the powerful, compelling narrative of the dome’s history via interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition.

The answer occurs naturally, as you will listen to this architect.
Which tells of the Radical architecture, the conceptual experiments, the work in Olivetti and the intense relationship with Ettore Sottsass. The adventure of Memphis. Buildings and objects. One of the most famous objects in the world, the Tolomeo lamp, which he designed for Artemide in 1985. The work with artisans, why at some point he picked up a chain saw and started making small wooden houses. And so the film is built almost by itself.

Herbert Matter was a man who seemingly fit many lives into one by excelling in the creative disciplines of design, photography and film. The documentary The Visual Language of Herbert Matter profiles his extraordinary life and seminal work. With the help of historical footage, vintage photographs, never-before-seen film excerpts (some shot by Matter himself) and a broad overwiew of his extensive body of work, the feature length documentary helps in bringing the picture of an almost forgotten creative genius back into focus.

This is the story of 43 columns designed by Philippe Starck for his most important architectural project, AlhóndigaBilbao, the new cultural center of the basque city. The designer wants the columns to represent the icons of cultures of all the world.
They have to be all different in style, form and material, 43 unique pieces. Starck calls the Italian production designer Lorenzo Baraldi to design the columns and look for craftsmen able to model these sculptures in bronze, steel, marble, terracotta, bricks, wood, concrete and Lecce’s stone.

Enzo Mari is an italian design mentor. During his life, Enzo Mari recognised paperweights in ordinary objects, often waste industrial products, given by friends or found in different situations. Each object is catalogued by listing its finding time and place, weight, material and occasion. The film has been realized in occasion of “The intellectual work: sixty paperweights” exhibition held in Milan during Salone del Mobile. To Mari the paperweights are not a simple collection of mirabilia, but methaphors to investigate the role of the intellectual, the cooperation of thinking and doing, heads and hands, words and things.

Lettera22 it’s a film about Adriano Olivetti, an industrial, politician, urbanist, a intellectual that has transformed with his work the history our country. Adriano Olivetti contribuited for 30 years to the building of the Italian ruling class. His thoughts, writings and work continue to be a actual reference for Italian and worldwide design.

Microtopia explores how architects, artists and ordinary problem-solvers are pushing the limits to find answers to their dreams of portability, flexibility – and of creating independence from “the grid”. Modern nomads, homeless people, people in stress, people in need of privacy or seclusion. We hear about the personal reasons behind the dwellings, and to see how they actually work. On the sidewalk, on rooftops, in industrial landscapes and in nature we will see and feel how these abodes meet the dreams set up by their creators. Microtopia deals with contemporary urgent ideas that are addressed, and solved, in a very surprising way.

A journey back in time to our recent futuristic past.A film about the rise and fall of the plastic Futuro house, a “Space Age” utopia that almost came true.The Futuro house, designed by architect Matti Suuronen, was first introduced in 1968 and was licensed to 24 different countries. It is both a reflection of the time and a utopian vision of “a new stance for tomorrow.” Its Flying Saucer-like elliptic shape reflects the late-60s optimism about the forthcoming conquest of Space. It was believed that mankind was about to enter a New Era in which technology would solve all imaginable problems; “In the 1980s, entire blocks of flats will be constructed out of plastic.

“The Story of the Kakiemon Porcelain Dynasty”
How does one take over a company that is four centuries old and has been run by one’s father, his father’s father and so on. Here is the unique story of such a time capsule where we witness how a modern-day Japanese family that has transformed everyday pottery into the world famous mythical Kakiemon porcelain and preserves its traditions, now passes on the leadership to their only son. Is he up to the task that lies ahead? What’s at stake if this successor does not succeed?

Follows internationally acclaimed husband and wife team, architect Robert McBride and interior designer Debbie Ryan, to discover what inspires their groundbreaking architectural concepts and designs. This intimate documentary observes the pressures of building a multi-story, twin-tower development; revolutionary new schools, one in the shape of an infinity symbol, and the ongoing construction and design of their own family.