Architecture & Design News South Africa

2016 Architect Africa Film Festival highlights

This year, the Architect Africa Film Festival (#AAFF2016) opened up its call for participants to showcase new productions, emerging filmmakers and students. The #AAFF2016 selection panel, comprising Professors Lesley Lokko, Lone Poulsen, and Jyoti Mistry, in collaboration with curator Dr Costanza la Mantia, evaluated the submissions based on watchability, technical execution, relevance of message, and relation to architecture.

The #AAFF2016 will be held at The Bioscope in Maboneng, Johannesburg, from 23-26 June.

Highlights include:

The Arcades Project 2.0 (2015) and Keeping the City in Line? (2015)
Director: Thomas Aquilina and Alex Lyons
These two short films portray the dominant downtown arcade buildings in Kampala, and the partially disused railway line in this city respectively, which were identified as fundamental to urban life. The parallels between these spaces of the Kampala landscape will, it is anticipated, become important in understanding how to propose new architecture in the city.

The Arcades Project 2.0 (2015)
The Arcades Project 2.0 (2015)

A Place to call Home (2015)
Director: Briar March
By narrating the story of the privatisation of state housing in New Zealand through the eyes of two Maori women involved in opposing housing projects, this film examines the new global trend in which social housing is run by private trusts and interest groups who care for specific subgroups within a community.

A Place to call Home (2015)
A Place to call Home (2015)

Excuse me while I disappear (2014)
Director: Michael MacGarry
The film was shot in Kilamba Kiaxi, a new city built outside Luanda, Angola. Built by Chinese construction company, CITIC, and financed by Hong Kong-based China International Fund, the new city is to be home to more than 210,000 people and is the single largest investment project by China in Africa.

Fictions: en route City (2016)
Director: Kgao Mashego
Fiction is a dimension of the mind that materialises the conscience of what we know and do not. In this film, Johannesburg is a fictional character and setting within and outside her own ends – history, present, future – a “city en-route”.

Tickets are available at www.thebioscope.co.za.

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