For a second city, Porto is fairly bursting with character. Intensely photogenic, it’s also a place that demands a presence of mind if you want to move through it; save for a core axis and a handful of boulevards, the topography of the old town is steeply inclined and demanding of both muscles and maps, with cobbled streets veering ‘round acute angles, haphazardly punctuated by renovations to the city’s subway system. Designated as a World Heritage site, the historic centre teems with contested claims, from the narrow and beautifully-tiled street frontages leading to communal yards — themselves informally occupied as self-built ilhas — to the contemporary influx of, on one hand, an explosion of tourists and on the other, immigrants, refugees and new identities flocking to the city. Wandering the steep streets, a flaneur in Porto would be confounded by the concatenation of constraints, influences, and concerns projected onto its fabric.
Over the course of the festival, three of their films demonstrated their practice and particular mode of storytelling; one which ultimately sheds all contrivance and pulls both audience and creators into the narrative of its very making.
However, this visit is not made to study the city itself. Rather, we’re here to learn from a host of more literal projections at Arquiteturas Film Festival — indeed, this year’s edition is titled Learning to Unlearn — now a veteran of a growing number of platforms focussed on film-making within architectural culture and production. This is the eleventh edition of the festival, directed overall by architect, academic and researcher Paulo Moreira.
Guest directors Bêka & Lemoine are among the best-known contemporary authors when it comes to architectural films — as filmmakers who specifically and intentionally address space, and how we live in it. Over the course of the festival, three of their films demonstrated their practice and particular mode of storytelling; one which ultimately sheds all contrivance and pulls both audience and creators into the narrative of its very making.
The first to be shown is the film Rehab (From Rehab), shot at the Herzog De Meuron-designed healthcare centre dedicated to those learning to cope with paralysis, paraplegia and quadriplegia. Paralleling the operations of the human body with the architectural entity, the film is an almost loving portrait of hope and healthcare, made all the more poignant as Louise Lemoine — one half of the filmmaking duo — witnessed her own father’s struggle to recover from a devastating car accident. Scarred by a childhood spent anxiously in hospital environments, her personal route to healing matches the progress of the patients’ on screen, as they relearn how to dwell in their bodies.
The building is certainly an actor in the film and in this process; one that nurtures and supports the efforts of patients, health workers and their families.
Among the pathos, the authors’ capacity for humour and humanity in observation is judiciously highlighted in conversations with patients and therapists, as well as through the intentional use of music and sound. Most spectacularly, a montage conveying the perspective of one whose world has been turned quite literally upside down; big-band jazz marks the tempo of a familiar world made strange, and bodies burdened with purpose and function appear like jolly dancers. As the view on screen flips, we are humbled by the realisation of what we choose not to notice. The building is certainly an actor in the film and in this process; one that nurtures and supports the efforts of patients, health workers and their families — as well as chickens, horses, dogs and myriad other beings that share the therapeutic campus.
By contrast, two more films by Bêka & Lemoine focus on the architect as a figure. In The Sense of Tuning (2023) — shot over a dozen hours in Mumbai, with Indian architect Bijoy Jain — we enjoy a uniquely intense encounter with the architect, though perhaps more interesting is the encounter with the city. Unlike the steady gaze of Rehab, or even Houselife (2008, Bêka & Lemoine’s first film, shot in the Maison á Bordeaux) — here the camera is constantly distracted, or rather fully saturated, by Mumbai itself. As is the case for almost anyone who visits India for the first time, there's far too much sensory stimulation — which comes across extremely well in the film. So much for the casual observation of everyday life — here, the everyday comes leaping down the lens from all angles, ready to perform.
Amid the Mumbai mania, Jain himself cuts an incongruously elegant, austere yet privileged figure, wafting through unsavoury alleys with practised ease, his tall profile floating above the sheer chaos like some serene, handloom-clad cloud — this has the effect of throwing the city into sharper contrast. This finely-tuned balance that Bijoy seeks to convey through the work of his office and the workings of his household offer more of a foil to the city, which ends up as the real character in the film. Particular to Mumbai is the way the city looks back at the viewer — perhaps because this is Bollywood, itself home to the world’s largest national film industry: almost every person who happens to fall under the gaze of Ila Bêka’s lens looks right back and performs in delighted response.
Bêka & Lemoine’s portraits of these much-revered figures are not heroic so much as they are revealing; as viewers, we are truly perched on their shoulders, near the action.
The presence of the filmmakers intensifies in Tokyo Ride (2020), again shot over the course of a single day with architect Ryue Nishizawa, best known as part of the celebrated Japanese practice SANAA with Kazuyo Sejima. This rollercoaster of a roadmovie really does focus on one figure, his way of thinking and moving through the city. In this case, the constraints of filming — mostly within the confines of the architect’s own tiny and temperamental vintage Alfa Romeo Giulia. Inevitably, this provides an instant intimacy; the subjects on screen grow more at ease with each other, to the extent that we as viewers feel fully complicit in the end. We’ve been cramped in the car too; we’ve been lashed by the unseasonal driving rain and heard the gearbox grind as Nishizawa skilfully skids into a parking spot. A genuinely funny scene at the end shows Nishizawa and fellow Tokyo-resident Moriyama san, pretending to gaze romantically at the moon; we’re all in on the game, simultaneously living contrarian, private and intensely unique lives, even as we too might appear to be characters on screen, like so many picturesque and moving maquettes. Bêka & Lemoine’s portraits of these much-revered figures are not heroic so much as they are revealing; as viewers, we are truly perched on their shoulders, near the action.
Film is a format which creators are exploring with ever-more ease, with sophisticated editing softwares and high-spec cameras available on even the most average of cellphones.
Film is a format which creators are exploring with ever-more ease, with sophisticated editing softwares and high-spec cameras available on even the most average of cellphones. As such, it was a joy to find the work of students and emergent practitioners at the festival. Fittingly for a festival themed around learning, the headquarters of Canal 180 — a partner institution to the film festival — plays host an installation made by students of architecture from the Royal College of Art, under the tutelage of AFF guest curators Locument.
In architectural and spatial experiments, their narratives and research are communicated through short films. Here are some interesting and engaging experiments in storytelling — using 8mm, digital film, animation and site research — serving narratives that might otherwise be difficult to communicate in their complexity. Under the heading ‘Political Ecologies of Toxicity’, the installation gathers shorts which demonstrate planetary urgencies in terms of climate crises, calamitous anthropocentrism and fragile prospects for inhabitation as well as the empowering capacity of filmic collaboration: while a student might conceive or script their project in London, the camera might be operated by a colleague in Ukraine, for instance, or borrow the footage of a specialist lab technician. Like architecture itself, film-making is a many-handed act of coordination and cooperation, and so a great deal of energy and hope is embedded in these speculative student works.
Like architecture itself, film-making is a many-handed act of coordination and cooperation.
A hilly stroll away from the students, tucked behind Termita (the battered bookshop of my dreams) is an installation by their tutors, Locument, an architectural research studio led by Francisco Lobo and Romea Muryń — and also guest curators of Learning to Unlearn. Here, their deep research on geological and geographical phenomena, unseen ecologies and invisible forces are showcased in a cycle of films, including Strata Incognita — co-directed with Grandeza Studio and featured in the Spanish Pavilion in last year’s edition of the Venice Biennale — and Computational Compost, their work on data centres and attendant ecological impacts with academic Marina Otero Verzier. Locument’s selection of films are a crucial part of the film festival, including Burial (Emilija Škarnulytė, 2021) — on the slow dismantlement of a former Ignalina nuclear power station in Lithuania — and Salome Jashi’s Taming the Garden (2021), on one man’s almost absurd dedication to the production of a desired landscape, challenging the notions of uprooting and migration.
Muryń and Lobo’s selection of short and experimental films — broadly related to displacement — included some of the most poignant and devastating works of the festival, starting with a breakneck rally-ride around a Kyiv that no longer exists (It's a Date, Nadia Parfan, 2022). Douwe Dijkstra’s Neighbour Abdi (2022) is another number that reveals the craft of film-making, the process being an almost therapeutic act of unburdening for Somalian immigrant Abdiwahab Ali — former convict, survivor and irrepressibly joyful creator. Abdi’s electrifying agency is contrasted with the heartbreaking plight of the three shepherd brothers in When the Mountain Rumbles (2022), by Alba Bresoli. Bound to a time and a way of living off the land, the relationship they hold with nature is soon to be crushed — physically, by bulldozers — in the wake of progress.
Other filmic ‘flights’ included a sequence focussed on the domestic environment — notably, the effervescent ‘indie’-feeling Miraflores, on the hormonal highs and lows of growing up on a residential estate, and Casa Conveniente, about a hard-won community initiative for post-prison rehabilitation.
On the ‘Africana-Porto’ walk, organised as part of the Arquiteturas Film Festival, researcher and guide Kai Fernandes pointed out the visibility and marginalisation of Porto’s Black haircare stores, African cultural venues and queer communities, discussing the legacies of Portugal’s colonial past and involvement in the slave trade alongside the plight and status of the recent immigrants from Brazil and Bangladesh. Such concerns also formed the basis of interrogation for AFF artist-in-residence and graduate architect Bonnie Bopela, whose installation mapped spontaneous spaces of performance across Porto. Decolonisation discourse clearly guided one sequence of experimental shorts, all produced by African or Afro-descendant authors and collectives. The Body of Earth (Day Rodrigues, 2023) and Terra Nakupa (Juliana Vicente, 2023) both address indigenous identity in Brazil; the latter particularly resonant on the plight of the people who were exploited, displaced by and most incredibly involved in the very building of Brasilia. Meanwhile Banga Colectivo’s Oku tumala oku tekula (2022) is portrait of how Angolan artisans and craftsmen might build a sense of identity and resilience; the narrative of the film invokes cultural tropes through dance and performance, intersected with the real lives and narratives of makers and vendors.
Having mentioned the increasing access of film and video making as a medium on the small screen, and at the risk of sounding pretentious, one might nevertheless discern between a film format and what we might describe as ‘cinema’. Yes, it’s akin to the fusty tussle between buildings and ‘architecture’. The most cinematic work of the festival then, without a doubt, was Denise Zmekhol’s Skin of Glass. The history that it uncovers — at human, urban and even national scales — cumulates to a shattering and moving effect. Perhaps one aspect of a cinematic narrative is its capacity, beyond entertainment or information, to take the viewer on a mental and emotional journey. In this case, the journey is not only intensely dramatic, but truly also one of learning and unlearning.
Perhaps one aspect of a cinematic narrative is its capacity, beyond entertainment or information, to take the viewer on a mental and emotional journey.
Documentaries redolent with research — especially in the hands of an experienced filmmaker like Zmekhol — can often be didactic. There are familiar tropes and techniques here — tasteful animations, ‘Ken Burns’ panning shots. Yet the story outgrows both the film and expectations held by Zmekhol and the audience alike. To make a film you generally have a script and an idea of what’s going to happen; this began as a very personal story, one embedded in the history of a city, and a nation. But then, things changed. As viewers — and incredibly, through the story of a building — we too go through an experience of a reeducation, spanning the idealistic ‘birth’ and military curtailment of the Brazilian dream, to Sao Paulo’s current housing crisis, its occupation movements and their vital necessity today.
The moment we step outside, projected narratives are reprojected onto the city; we take the questions from the screen with us, from the darkened theatre back onto the streets.
So what is to be gained from just under a week of imaginative flights and speculative images, dancing across screens and captivating us in suspended animation, for an approximate run time of 750 minutes? The moment we step outside, projected narratives are reprojected onto the city; we take the questions from the screen with us, from the darkened theatre back onto the streets. It is fitting, then, that the last film to be shown at the festival should bring it all back home; Habitar, which focuses on the state of housing in Porto. The film, by Canal 180 director Joaquin Mora, is structured across a number of residents, following the model of a talking-heads style assemblage through which one accumulates a relatively differentiated portrait of the city and its inhabitants. Traipsing across its historic centre and museum districts, one may well be confused as to why so many beautiful specimens of Porto’s tiled and individuated townhouses appear unoccupied, derelict. The many lessons from the stories told through the incomparably empathetic medium of film provide much food for thought for the city itself, and suggest ways in which it could unlearn and relearn how to flourish and nurture its citizens.
Bio
Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.
