The Competition features the offices of five starchitects—Frank Gehry, Dominique Perrault, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, and Nouvel—as they fight to win the commission for the first National Museum of Art in Andorra, a tiny country of fewer than 100,000 people sandwiched between Spain and France in the Pyrenees. Shot in 2009 by a team of Spanish architects turned novice moviemakers, the film will inaugurate the Copenhagen Architecture Festival x Film on March 26 (other upcoming screenings include April 4 at the Filmmuseum Munich in Berlin and May 8 at The Barbican in London). It offers a rare and comical look at the inner workings of some of the most prestigious firms in the business and sheds light on the ways starchitects carefully curate their public images.

Madrid-based architect Angel Borrego Cubero, who has spent the last five years working on the film, was slogging through his own competition in 2007 when he decided that his next project would be a commentary on the intense pressure of those events. Late that year he got a small grant from a visual-arts center in Spain to start filming a documentary. After six months of searching, he heard about a restricted competition in Andorra open to Pritzker Prize winners or those with similar honors.