Other featured ADFF:NYC films include Soviet Bus Stops, a travelogue that follows Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig as he treks thousands of miles across the former USSR in search of beautiful and bizarre public transit kiosks leftover from the totalitarian regime; The Promise, German director Jan Schmidt-Garre’s portrait of the recently departed Pritzker Prize–winning giant of Modernist Indian architecture, B.V. Doshi; The Power of Utopia – Living with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh from Swiss filmmakers Karin Bucher and Thomas Karrer; and Point of Origin, which documents the design and construction of one of Rem Koolhaas’s smallest—but most challenging—commissions: an ultra-narrow home on an ultra-precarious site in the Austrian alps.

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Stills from Modernism, Inc. (1) and The Power of Utopia (2). Images courtesy ADFF

Selected as the opening night film is Jason Cohn’s Modernism, Inc., which charts the formidable legacy of New England architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes, a Gropius protégé best known for his work with corporate behemoths—namely IBM and Mobil—and residential commissions in Connecticut.  

Another film making its stateside debut is Radical Landscapes, which like My Architect, is the work of a filmmaker who also happens to be a direct descendent of the subject-architect. In this instance, that filmmaker is Elettra Fiumi, daughter of Fabrizio Fiumi, a central member of Florentine avant-garde collective Gruppo 9999. Also on the familial front, Skin of Glass—a “cinematic meditation on displacement, inequality, and loss”—finds journalist Denise Zmekhol turning her focus to most celebrated building designed by her late father, Syria-born Brazilian architect Roger Zmekhol: a sleek (now destroyed) 1960s-era São Paulo office tower-turned-vertical favela known as Pele de Vidro.

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Stills from Soviet Bus Stops (3), Point of Origin (4), Radical Landscapes (5), and Skin of Glass (6). All images courtesy ADFF; photo © Plinio Hokama (6).

Of course, an architecture-focused New York film festival wouldn’t be complete without a documentary about a high-profile new building in the Big Apple itself. This comes in the form of veins, which will make its world premiere as a double feature alongside Point of Origin on October 13. Directed by Laurian Ghinițoiu and Arata Mori, the film is described as offering “a poetic look at the epic journey materials make to build our modern world.” Assuming the starring role is the 30,000 tons of Portuguese marble used in the translucent stone facade of the newly opened Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan. The building’s architect, REX founding principal Joshua Ramus, will be joined by Ghinițoiu for a post-screening conversation moderated by RECORD editor in chief Josephine Minutillo.  

Click here for a complete screening schedule and ticketing information for ADFF:NYC and to learn more about the festival’s next stops during its 2022–2023 season.