Ninth annual Architecture and Design Film Festival announces lineup

The lineup for the ninth annual Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF) in New York City has been announced, and it includes over 30 feature-length and short films celebrating “the creative spirit that drives architecture and design.”

Kicking off on November 1, the five-day festival will open with Catherine Hunter’s documentary Glenn Murcutt: Spirit of Place, a film that follows the enigmatic Pritzker Prize-winning Australian architect as he builds a new mosque for an Islamic community in Melbourne.

Closing ADFF:NY will be the festival’s first ever narrative film: Columbus, directed by video essayist Kogonada and starring John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson. Columbus tells the story of a man (played by Cho) who has come to the Indianian city to watch over his father, a renowned architect who has fallen ill during a speaking tour. Here, he meets a young architecture enthusiast (Richardson), and the two of them embark on a friendship set against the backdrop of Columbus’s modern buildings.

Other highlights of the festival include the world premiere of SuperDesign, a film by Francesca Molteni about Italy’s radical design period of the ’60s and ’70s, and the New York premiere of The Neue Nationalgalerie, a documentary about Mies van der Rohe’s 1968 building, directed by Ina Weisse. ADFF:NY runs through November 5.