Milan Design Film Festival 2019

From October 24th to 27th the Milan Design Film Festival will take place, entirely dedicated to stories of architects and designers, styles, avant-gardes and surveys on major social issues. In its four days and in the spaces of the Anteo Palazzo del Cinema the public will be able to watch screenings of films and a series of meetings and debates on the themes of the Festival.

The 2019 editions themes

Within the Festival program here are nine films selected by the Guest Curator and international critic Alice Rawsthorn – nine films chosen with a precise question in mind: “What makes a film a design film?” Is a film design the one that tells us about the impact of design on our lives or is it rather when the film demonstrates how design can be applied to the seventh art?
The selection of Rawsthorn and the entire Festival are in fact aimed at demonstrating how a design film can be all these things and also touch on topics such as consumerism, industrialization or pollution.
So, in the main section of the Festival – which this year takes the title of Mind the Gap – curated by Antonella Dedini, Silvia Robertazzi and Porzia Bergamasco, there are more than 50 films that indicate the relationship between project and innovation, memory and the future, equality and diversity.

5 movies not to be missed at the Milan Design Film Festival 2019

The choice of films is plentiful and – having to choose only a handful of titles to be seen in the few days available – we consider these five representative films, regardless of whether they belong to the Mind the Gap container or to the selection of titles proposed by the Guest Director. These are five films that – talking about design, architecture and great art – can demonstrate all the potential narrative of the great cinema.

The Truth About Killer Robots (United States, 2018)

The first film is a documentary that investigates the death of the first supposed victims of Artificial Intelligence: the director Pozdorovkin shows us engineers, journalists and philosophers faced with a single question: when death occurs because of a robot, whose is the fault? The deaths that occurred and reported in this feature film are three and reported by news stories: a worker crushed by a mechanical arm in a Volkswagen factory, a driver of a self-driving car who died in a car accident and the first case of a person killed by a police-robot in the United States.

The Human Shelter (Denmark, 2018)

What do we mean by “home”? What makes us feel at home – even if the house is in an Iraqi refugee camp, on a Lagos lagoon or the outskirts of Tokyo? The director Boris Benjamin has explored the different ways of living in our contemporary society: in the most diverse contexts, in the most extreme conditions, showing us the relationship between man and geography.

Man With a Movie Camera (USSR, 1929)

This is one of the cornerstones of the history of cinema. Without this Soviet masterpiece many titles of modern cinema would be difficult to imagine: in just over an hour Dvertov has freed and raised many of the technical possibilities of what was then a relatively new art: double exposures, oblique filming, parallel assembly, slow motion, split screen – in a feast of oddities that make this film a joy for the eyes of the warned and aware spectator.

City Dreamers (Canada, 2018)

A documentary that tells the story of life and work of four of the most award-winning women in the history of architecture and urban planning: Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and Denise Scott Brown. Their stories are intertwined with those of Modernism and Contemporary Art and reveal – through archive materials and interviews – the careers of four women who have left their mark in a world of men thanks to innovative, ingenious and sustainable ideas.

The Idea Is Paramount. The Architectural Passions of Andrzej Wajda (Poland, 2017)

Directed by the Polish Jacek Link-Lenczowski, this documentary captures the admiration for architecture of the Oscar, Golden Bear and career-Golden Lion winner Andrzej Wajda. The Polish filmmaker who died in 2016 has not only signed some of the most beautiful films of the new Eastern European cinema after the Second World War (including: A Generation, Ashes and Diamonds and Man of Iron), but he also personally contributed to the construction of the Manggha Center for Japanese Art and Technology in Krakow and the Wyspiański Pavilion dedicated to the Polish dramatist, painter, poet and designer of the same name..

Immagine:

Anteo Palazzo del Cinema @Giulia Virgara

Target Point, Italian Ideas