One of the few festivals dedicated specifically to architecture on screen, Arquiteturas Film Festival — directed by Paulo Moreira — celebrates its eleventh iteration, with interventions, exhibitions and events across the city of Porto. Celebrated filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine are the guest directors, with much of their work showcased under this year’s theme of Learning to Unlearn. Here, all three share their thoughts on the eve of the festival.

KoozArch accompanies the festival invited by INSTITUTO, with the support of DGArtes / Ministry of Culture of Portugal.

SHUMI BOSE / KOOZThis is the third edition of the Arquiteturas Film Festival in Porto. How much is the city an actor or participant in terms of the film festival?

PAULO MOREIRA The festival moved to Porto in 2022 after eight editions in Lisbon. Following a transition edition in 2021, co-organised with founding director Sofia Mourato in Lisbon, we relocated the festival to Porto, where we have our base. We accepted this challenge because we realised that AFF could enrich the dialogues we have been bringing to Porto through the broader programme of exhibitions, workshops, talks, and residencies at our cultural centre, Instituto.

The festival allows us to propose a network of venues across the city and foster an experience where the spatial settings and the urban spaces themselves are as much the protagonists as the festival programme. Together with films, we propose walks, debates, and installations, in a kind of sequence without overlaps in the schedule – like in a film, actually. In addition to the screenings at our maincinema venue, Batalha, we have sessions at independent spaces such as Circo de Ideias, Canal 180. and Térmita, as well as the University of Porto’s Casa Comum. This year, we are particularly proud to create a series of installations that complement the films.

KOOZ Let’s talk about learning and unlearning: how did the theme occur to you?

PM It is crucial not to understand the concept of "unlearning" solely as the negation of its opposite. Unlearning is not simply the reverse of acquiring knowledge; it encompasses deeper nuances. Arriving at this theme took some time; as with each year, the starting point for the 2024 edition was reading and researching films. In the summer of 2023, I began reading the newly published book The Emotional Power of Space, edited by Bêka & Lemoine. Although the chapters are predominantly directed towards the first spatial memories and sensory experiences of the interviewees, there is a theme, implicit in various testimonies, that stands out: the fact that the authors' current practices are contrary to what they were taught in architecture schools. It is as if their work consists of doing what they learned to "not do" in school; or the university had taught them the rules so that they could later break them. This relationship between teaching and practice is encapsulated by Bijoy Jain when he says, "It is the unlearning that I enjoy teaching as a way for me to unlearn too."

The reciprocal relationship between my own edited book, Aprender a Desaprender (Learning to Unlearn) and the festival was solidified when I watched Rehab (From Rehab), a film by Bêka & Lemoine that depicts a hospital in Basel designed by Herzog & de Meuron. In an "upside-down" film sequence, a poetic and revealing phrase suggests that seeing the world upside down is a stimulating possibility…

LOUISE LEMOINE As Paulo said, the question of learning and unlearning appears in our conversation with Bijoy (Jain), and he told us that it struck him quite a lot. In fact, education is a big topic in our recent book; not necessarily architectural education, but generally questioning how we learn. How in early childhood, there might be a way to develop more awareness of the quality of spaces in which we live. Could we, through play, develop a more embodied form of education for kids — to make them a bit more aware of the relations they build with space?

In our films, we look for other forms of knowledge about architecture, to show that you can learn a lot about the qualities of space and the quality of an architecture based on how it affects people. We've been giving voice to anonymous people, to their spontaneous reactions, in all our films, which are not formalised by the language of architecture. We try to pay attention to other forms of language, from body language to all other forms of intuitive and instinctive reactions to space. So there is this idea of unlearning architecture through other forms of languages.

KOOZ What were some of your intentions or aspirations when you invited Louise & Ila as guest directors for AFF this year? Can you talk about how other participants relate to these intentions?

PM One change we made when relocating the festival to Porto was to replace the ‘guest country’ section — an outdated concept, in my opinion, which celebrated a particular nation. We brainstormed various formats to host guests. In past editions, we invited two institutions working with film as a research and curatorial tool: the CDA (Centre for Documentary Architecture) and the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture). This year, we were eager to invite a collective to showcase their work, and Beka & Lemoine’s practice was a natural choice.

I hope that their participation, along with that of various festival participants, will address this issue through original perspectives on architecture and contemporary cities. We've always aimed for a balance between internationally renowned guests and local actors. This led us to Locument — Romea Muryn and Francisco Lobo, based in Porto — who employ architecture and cinema as analytical, critical, and subversive tools. We are pleased with their selection includes feature films by Emilija Škarnulytė and Salomé Jashi, and a series of shorts. They also proposed two installations complementing the programme, and it's noteworthy that this is Locument debut in a curatorial position – underlining our desire to experiment with and challenge new roles.

One of the main inspirations for this project was the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko, where decolonisation was central to the disciplinary debate. The Laboratory of the Future was a pivotal exhibition for this discourse, featuring some architects, artists, and authors who had previously visited Instituto. Organising the film festival under the theme ‘Learning to Unlearn’ felt like the perfect opportunity to bring these ideas together into a multifaceted programme. We invited Portuguese-speaking participants from the Laboratory of the Future: Margarida Waco, Cartografia Negra, Colectivo Banga, along with two films commissioned for the Brazil Pavilion, directed by Day Rodrigues and Juliana Vicente. We are arranging a complementary debate titled ‘Back to the Future’, where we hope to discuss the legacy left by the Biennale for these practitioners and filmmakers.

There are more highlights to mention, but what's important is to see the dialogues established between different generations and geographies, based on practices that intersect architecture with academia, culture, history and other ways of inhabiting the world.

KOOZ Addressing Bêka & Lemoine, what can you anticipate and explore with the scope of a live and durational programme like AFF?

LL During the COVID lockdown, we had the pleasure of running a seminar series for the AA, called The Sensitive Observers. Thanks to Zoom, we were able to build up a program inviting many people from other parts of the world; it was so interesting that we then started to do more curating projects like that. This year, for instance, we curated the public programme for the Mendrisio school of architecture, that was also really interesting.

I think what Paulo is trying to do, through the Arquiteturas Film Festival, is to create a sort of community around the festival creating connections between people and projects from abroad with the local community. For us, being in Porto for a few days is about how you meet a public and how you create some bonds and relationships with people on site. So the idea is really about how you create a community around an event which can last for some days.

KOOZ When we met recently, we talked about the speed and ‘system’ you have developed when filming. Can you talk about your process and how you have refined it over time?

IB ‘Homo Urbanus’ is a large scale film project we have been working on these past years, about streetlife and how people relate to public space in very different cultures. That project made us evolve in terms of process and methodology. Before that, we mainly made films in closed environments, often domestic spaces, that means limited places that you can easily control. Working instead at the scale of big cities and shooting in the street without script, without big staff, without let’s say staging reality beforehand requires an enormous effort to be ultra reactive and receptive to what happens all around you. This is something we like very much, how you can immerse yourself in complex environments and make a film out of your immediate capacity of observation. That’s a fantastic training of sensibility.

LL What probably evolved in terms of methodology is also how we like to work with constraints, creative constraints. Recently, we tend to make them even more radical. We've always made films that talk about a specific situation, shot in a specific moment. The film on the Barbican for instance was shot in one month and the film is built as a diary, so the time spent there serves as the editing structure. The more we evolve, the more we like to work with these time constraints, even to the point of films that are shot in twenty four hours. Reducing that time constraint to the extreme — like twenty four hours — creates a strong performative dimension in the process of shooting which gives a great emphasis on our sense of presence in the here and now. All of our films are made with this intensity of presence, translating an experience we lived in a specific place at a specific time. Ultimately, Ila often says, our ambition now is to make a film of one hour, shot in one hour, no edit.

KOOZ Who or what for you is the subject in your idea of a good architectural film — is it the building, the architect, the inhabitants?

PM I’m interested in learning from what architecture can do for its users, and films have this capacity; they can tell stories about buildings without necessarily listening to the architects themselves. In ‘Learning to Unlearn’, we are showing a film by Joaquin Mora titled Habitar, portraying ways of living through a diversity of characters in their homes. These testimonies address fundamental themes for reflecting on the role of housing in our society, the expectations and rights associated with it, the crisis of gentrification, and the effects of tourism, among others. On one hand, these are topics we architects should contemplate; on the other hand, it’s an understandable medium for anyone, which is something not all formats for disseminating architectural culture can achieve.

But there are cases where the story about an architect can be a starting point for addressing more complex issues that go beyond their legacy. In the festival's closing session, we will present Skin of Glass, by Denise Zmekhol, a Brazilian director based in California, and whose late father Roger Zmekhol's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, had become occupied by hundreds of homeless families. What starts as an intention to return to her father’s achievement as an architect ends up being a meditation on displacement, inequality, and loss, exposing the brutal reality of squatting. Suddenly, Denise embarks on a journey not only with people who had a connection to her father’s work but also with city officials who see the building as a threat to public safety, occupation leaders fighting to protect the rights of squatters, and residents of the building. Denise will be with us at the screening session, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about the symbolic importance of this building as a reflection of Brazil’s political and economic turmoil over the last half-century.

LL Working at the crossroads of different disciplines, we show our films in different contexts: from art museums, to documentary film festivals and also architecture exhibitions and biennales. Meeting this diversity of public is very important for us because it means a large spectrum of readings. In the context of architecture film festivals, we’ve always felt a bit like outsiders because we don’t share much with what is usually called an ‘architecture film’. We have tried to challenge this question of what cinema could bring to architecture from our first film, Koolhaas Houselife, which was a sort of intentional provocation. Given the intense debate this film sparked from the start, with both enthusiastic support and terrible criticism about how we were showing things that were “unshowable”, we understood the great need to dig this further in order to enlarge the spectrum of what can be said, and what can be shown, because the field of architectural representation was incredibly limited at the time.

IB We can sometimes meet a certain misunderstanding from the strictly architectural public which would expect from a film to be basically explicative and informative about a building or the oeuvre and life of an architect. But that’s not what we aim for. We are more interested to unveil how much the spaces in which we live, work and spend our lives impact us on so many layers, being physical, emotional, social, political… That’s why our films delve into the life stories of so many people rather than making nice shots of architecture. What interests us is observing this complex alchemy between individuals and their living spaces, and our incredible capacity to adapt despite the constraints and difficulties. I think it's thanks to this anthropological perspective that we can really grasp the universal scope of architecture, which is not a subject for specialists but a question of interest to everyone.

Bios

Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine have been working together for the past fifteen years, researching and experimenting new narrative and cinematographic forms in relation to contemporary architecture and urban environment. Focusing their interest mainly on how the built environment shapes and influences our daily life, they have developed a very unique and personal approach. As video-artists, filmmakers, producers and publishers, their works have been shown, collected and recognised by many prestigious organisations and cultural institutions around the world. Bêka Lemoine published the book The Emotional Power of Space in 2023.

Paulo Moreira is an architect and researcher based in Porto and Johannesburg. He graduated from FAUP (Portugal) having studied also at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio. He completed a PhD at London Metropolitan University, and is currently a Centennial Postdoc Fellow at the School of Architecture & Planning, Wits University. He is the founder and artistic director of INSTITUTO, and the director of Arquiteturas Film Festival. With his work on informal communities in Angola, he was a finalist in the RIBA President’s Award for Research 2019 and a recipient of the 2021 Grant to Individuals awarded by the Graham Foundation. Moreira is the author of Reciprocidades (Circo de Ideias, 2023), and the editor of Critical Neighbourhoods – The Architecture of Contested Communities (Park Books, 2022), and Aprender a Desaprender (Dafne, 2024).

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.