Alterlaa, Austria’s largest social housing complex, once promised its residents a happy life: “Everyone should live like the rich.” What remains of this promise made in the 1970s is explored in Bianca Gleissinger’s debut documentary. The director, who grew up in the complex, reconnects with her eccentric neighbours at the…
In the late 1960s, young Belgian architect A.J. Lode Janssens built an experimental inflatable home for his family. Using newly developed materials and technologies, Lode Janssens explored timeless ideas about the essence of a home. The film offers a portrait of an architect who remained open to experimentation and optimistic…
There are more than 200 “new towns” and numerous “satellite neighbourhoods” across Europe. Built from scratch in the post-war period using standardisation and prefabrication, they were designed primarily to house the industrial workforce. Although developed in different contexts, they share similar origins, functional organisation, design principles, and age. In Eastern…
Fernand Pouillon, once dubbed “France’s Most Wanted Architect”, designed and built over five million square metres during his fifty-year career, primarily in France and Algeria. Pouillon flew thousands of kilometres every week in propeller planes, travelling from one construction site to another: Marseille, Paris, Algiers, and even the middle of…
First, Do No Harm explores the transformation of Transylvania’s Saxon villages through the encounters between the residents who have stayed and newcomers from cities in search of a different way of life. A group of newcomers recount how they left the cities and settled in Alma Vii, Richiș, or Biertan.
Architects Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, and Frédéric Druot strongly opposed the French government’s policy of demolishing and rebuilding social housing, introduced in 2003, choosing instead to transform existing buildings. For them, transformation means, above all, changing the way we look at architecture and the city. The film follows a free-flowing…
The first house architect Gerrit Rietveld designed in 1924, together with and for his partner Truus, was a bold experiment – one in which Truus would live for sixty years, despite the fact that this remarkable home was not necessarily a comfortable one. Although Rietveld believed that a house should…
In the former German Democratic Republic, the war left an urgent need for space, prompting some innovative solutions: the creation of ingeniously designed mobile and telescopic structures that served as emergency housing, hospitals, community spaces, or cafés. Some of these structures still exist today, yet they remain largely unnoticed. Taking…
Nubia Way, a development of 13 houses in London, was built in the 1990s by a group formed in response to the extremely long waiting lists for social housing, a problem that disproportionately affected Black people. Nubia Way was the second of three housing developments built by the group in…
In the heart of Rome, an apartment has remained untouched since 1958. It is the home and studio where Giacomo Balla, one of the most important Futurist painters and a leading figure of the early 20th-century European avant-garde, spent the last thirty years of his life. The entire space –…
In a newly built housing estate on the outskirts of Prague, nothing works: the streets have no names, the apartments are riddled with defects, infrastructure is lacking, and residents struggle not only with the uniformity and ugliness of the new buildings, but also with lies, infidelity, and mistrust. Panelstory weaves…
In the late 1960s, a group of architects arrived in Vermont with a simple plan: not just to design houses, but to build them themselves. For them, architecture became a creative experiment in which making mistakes was an essential part of the process. The director grew up among these unfinished…
The documentary explores a troubling global phenomenon: the soaring cost of housing, even as people’s incomes remain stagnant. Will our cities become too expensive for us to afford to live in them? Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, sets out to understand this crisis, which is forcing…
Having experienced homelessness himself, carpenter Khaleel Seivwright begins building small but well-insulated shelters for people forced to spend the winter on the streets of Toronto. Against the backdrop of Canada’s housing crisis, his initiative quickly gains attention beyond the city, inspiring both solidarity and strong opposition from local authorities.
Programme curators: Ana Szel (researcher), Andrei Rus (film critic), Alex Axinte (architect), Irina Tulbure (architect) Moderators: Alex Axinte (architect), Andrei Rus (film critic) The programme proposes a format in which the screenings are accompanied by a critical discussion. A researcher (Ana Szel), a historian (Corina Doboș), and an architect (Irina…
The First Siza is a documentary about “The Four Houses in Matosinhos”, Álvaro Siza’s first completed project, designed while he was still a student. Sixty years after the completion of the four houses, Siza revisits them alongside his first client, who owns one of the homes. This reunion offers an…
From Timișoara in the final decades of communism to the changing city that emerged after 1989, architect Vlad Gaivoronschi journeys through several versions of Romania. Nearly fifty years of architecture come together in drawings, collective housing developments, single-family homes, public buildings, and fragments of the urban fabric, but above all,…
The final film in Béla Tarr’s “proletarian trilogy”, which began with Family Nest (1979) and continued with The Outsider(1981), Prefab People paints an intimate portrait of a generation and a social class. Episodes from the family life of a working-class couple, Férj and Feleség, unfold in a non-linear structure: an…
The Baaibuurt-West neighbourhood in Amsterdam is undergoing a transformation in response to the housing crisis in the Netherlands. The urban regeneration project involves raising the sinking ground level by adding seven metres of sand to prepare the area for new residential developments. The documentary captures the stories and spaces of…
Amid the housing crisis, sharing a home with several other people is sometimes the only option. Artist Susanna Tomassini explores young people’s perspectives on collective living and the ways in which they come to share space, belongings, and inevitably, aspects of their personal lives. The film is screened alongside…
A group of young, educated, and financially well-off families is selected to move to Tingbjerg, a disadvantaged neighbourhood on the outskirts of Copenhagen with a history marked by conflict and segregation. As part of a social experiment, they purchase newly built homes at reduced prices, on the condition that they…
The film introduces the Spanish model of cooperative housing – where residents can live in their apartments indefinitely without owning them individually, as the building is collectively owned – and is part of a research project launched in 2021 by the architectural collective El Tinglado. The film explores existing initiatives…
Where will you live when you grow old? Will your city take care of you? The documentary Where We Grow Older explores how the growing ageing population is reshaping architectural and social structures, questioning the role of urban planning and public policy in addressing these challenges. From Barcelona to Baltimore,…
