For the morning we had an invitation to the AFFR Forum, where all the filmmakers and representatives from festivals could participate in a workshop to get to know each other and share visions.
At first we were supposed to get to know each other and were put together in teams of two or three participants. We had a half hour to get know the other person and his project, and then had to present them instead of presenting ourselves and our project.
This was quite interesting, because doing such an “elevator pitch” for someone else was quite challenging as it required concentration and the time to listen. The effect was therefore very bonding, because you wanted to represent the other person as well as he or she should represent you.
I liked this idea of creating in a short matter of time a little “film-festival-family-feeling”, which one would not have had without this gathering. As Rotterdam is a big city, and we didn’t know so many people in this town, this forum was helpful to connect. We were spoiled by our “Five Lake Film Festival” (www.fsff.de), where it always felt like a class reunion in our small town of Starnberg. But we recognised a face from the Architecture Film Days in Munich, because we had attended the Premiere of the documentary “Sep Ruf – The Architect of Modernism”. The director Johann Betz was showing his film today and it was a great opportunity to get to know each other better.
But we did know some other people from Rotterdam, who we met on our bike tour on the Camino in Hontana. So we were happy that Angelie and André joined us for lunch at the “LantarenVenster”. It was great to see them again because we could share some memories of the Camino. They even chose to join us and see one of the architecture films, which was called “Sanatorium”. It’s a film about a dated Sanatorium near Odessa with its own socialist architecture. It seemed to be stuck in the eighties without having even having changed the staff, but slowly the war is getting closer and changed the film-project’s plot during the shoot.
The next film was perfectly fitting our “Less-is-more-Tour” subject of sustainable architecture with its title “Make Materials Matter” by Marc-Christoph Wagner. It’s a portrait of the architect Søren Pihlmann, who is using existing materials during the renovation of old buildings to give them a new purpose. Either by just cutting concrete ceilings and tilting them into a new stairways, or change them into tables and bars, or just upcycle what can’t be completely used for another purpose. He was selected to curate the Danish pavilion at the Biennale in Venice, which follows the concept of “build of site”, digging even under the foundations of the existing building to research the given materials and their possible use.
