Top picks for the Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival

As many of you hopefully already know, the Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival is starting today at Rialto Cinemas Newmarket in Auckland (until May 21), before opening at The Embassy in Wellington (May 29 to June 11) and at Rialto Cinemas Dunedin (June 12-22).

You can download a PDF of the programme here. And you can book tickets here. (Wellingtonians: please note you should use the link to the Event Cinemas website).

Over the next few days we'll tell you our picks from the festival lineup - all the films are tantalising, but we've got to be in the office some of the time, so we'll tell you which movies are at the top of our lists. 

Here are some of HOME editor Jeremy Hansen's picks:

"I'm crazy about the work of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Japanese firm SANAA, especially after going to see their Museum of 21st Century Art in  Kanazawa a few years ago (do you like how I dropped that in?). So I'm really excited about seeing The Interior Passage, a documentary about the making of their Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland (left), an incredible-looking building that creates its own kind of terrain. It also sounds like the documentary is an interesting look at the pressures of creating such an avant-garde building, and how architectural vision gets tested by the realities of budget pressures and engineering challenges."



"I saw If You Build It (that's the trailer above) at the festival opening night, and although it wouldn't quite have made my original list, it was fantastic and really uplifting and I think everyone should see it. In it, two designers take over the workshop programme at a high school in a downtrodden country in North Carolina, and lead their students on a fantastic journey that has a heart-warming and lasting effect on the entire town. Lots of people in the audience were crying, as it's impossible not to be moved by this film. 



"I can never see too much of the work of the great modernist architect Richard Neutra, and this documentary, The Oyler House: Richard Neutra's Desert Retreat, (trailer above) which focuses one on of his lesser-known homes, looks irresistible. It's just 48 minutes long, so it screens with Desert Utopia: Midcentury Architecture in Palm Springs - a double-bill that's sure to satiate even the most ravenous modernists.

"I'm also excited about seeing the documentary about the great Japanese architect Tadao Ando: From Emptiness to Infinity because Ando's works are so fantastic, and any insight into how he creates them has got to be a good thing.




"And while it isn't about architecture, the idea of a fashion documentary featuring Givenchy, Dior, Ungaro, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin along with Andy Warhol, Christina Onassis, Liza Minnelli, Josephine Baker and Rudolf Nureyev all getting together for an epic fashion show at Versailles just sounds too amazing to be true. The film's called Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution and pits the French against American designers including Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein and Bill Blass. It looks like the kind of thing that anyone interested in fashion should see."