Restoring a Masterpiece: The Renovation of Eastman Theatre

Dresden is famous for its attempt to meticulously reconstruct its once bombed-out historical center and bring the colorful baroque settings of the 18th century back to life. It’s infamous for the right-wing-surge that has since 2015 swept the city and made it a center of far-right activity in Germany and Europe. This film is an exploration of where the two intersect.

Through a series of animated art boards depicting a decaying Venice, the film unfolds like a set of postcards, capturing the mythical city's final moments of fragility. Blending archival footage with contemporary observations, and anchored by the story of the 1902 collapse of St Mark's Campanile, Venezia Diorama invites us to reflect on a city slowly eroding, yet suspended in time.

Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.

In the summer of 1900, the first film camera was purchased by Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar for Iran, and immediately the first Iranian moving images were captured by this camera. These images, in an obsessive manner, have embodied the mesmerized gaze of people. In the span of 79 years since the purchase of this camera, Iran has undergone two revolutions and two coups, and throughout all these moments, the camera has been present as the recorder of people's mesmerized gazes. These mesmerized gazes are in a way as if they are the ones looking at us, not the other way around. It seems like these gazes are trying to convey something, but what? No one knows. Now, we gaze at those who have gazed at us from a distant time.

Celebrating the splendor and grandeur of the great cinemas of the United States, built when movies were the acme of entertainment and the stories were larger than life, as were the venues designed to show them. The film also tracks the eventual decline of the palaces, through to today’s current preservation efforts. A tribute to America’s great art form and the great monuments created for audiences to enjoy them in.

Follows the story of "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in his attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.

The film arose from an encounter with Mario Botta during the 2013 Architecture and Memory exhibit held at the Charlotte, North Carolina Bechtler Museum of Modern Art which was designed by the architect. The exhibit gathered and then proposed to the public the Swiss architect’s most significant projects spanning the gamut from his first single-family homes, original expressions of the School of Ticino, to his large public buildings, libraries, theatres, museums, churches and synagogues which have been built across the globe and features more than 90 works. The film is a dialogue on the themes which characterize Mario Botta’s vision and practice: his relationship with history and the territory, the designing of collective spaces, encounters with the leading protagonists of the 20th century. The interview, conducted in Mario Botta’s studio in Mendrisio, is replete with photographic materials, designs and sketches which document his “spaces of memory”.

A film about the pioneering community-building project of the world-famous architect Frei Otto in Berlin, called the Okohaus-an experimental, ecological, customized housing project in the city center. Including interviews with Frei Otto, Christine Kanstinger-Otto, Hermann Kendel, Yona Friedman, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, and other involved architects, planners, and inhabitants, the film shows the development and the philosophy of the project, which was built for the International Building Exhibition in Berlin 1987 (IBA).

Invisible Water Layers discusses and questions the origins of Teresina and its urbanization over the years. The film deals with the move from the capital of Piauí to Oeiras in 1852, the ideas of modernity at the time and the problems that resulted from this process in people and in the city. Along with the idea of ​​progress of the railway, factories and steamboats, many families and workers were relocated from the central areas of the city to more distant parts. The traditional ways of life of these people coexisted, not free from conflict, with the will of civility of the local elites. With 4 interviewees, including architects, historians and researchers, the film also brings a rich set of images from different places in the city, such as the Center, the Parnaíba riverbank and the Poty Velho neighborhood.