Report: Architecture and Design Film Festival 2025
From films on architects like BV Doshi and Eileen Grey to documentaries on biomimicry and green architecture, the four-day event had much to offer
The annual Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF), which had its first edition in New York in 2009 — made its South Asian debut at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai earlier this year. The venue designed by Philip Johnson served as the perfect location because of its proximity to the city’s business quarter, the arts district, historically important buildings that date back to the British era, and Marine Drive, a public space where people across socio-economic backgrounds gather by the glorious Arabian Sea.
“The way people move in Mumbai is very similar to New York. It is chaotic but people know how to navigate the density. There is a similar energy in both cities. People are in a hurry but there is a lot of friendliness too,” said Kyle Bergman, Director and Founder, ADFF at the event that was held from January 9 to 12. Inviting participants to plunge into the experience, he added, “The conversations that architects and designers have with each other are much more inclusive when there is a broader audience representing people from different walks of life.”
The highlight of the premiere night was a keynote address by Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Taking off from German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the affinity between film and architecture, Stierli said, “Both depend on the involvement of the viewer’s body; they entail what we can call an embodied spectatorship.” The difference is this: the person engaging with architecture relates to “immobile and static material objects” whereas the person who is watching a film relates to “mobile and immaterial images”.
A large contingent of students pursuing courses in architecture and design showed up to participate in the event. Amit Gupta, founder of STIR, the curatorial agency that brought the festival to Mumbai, revealed that they wrote to deans and professors and requested them to send their students as they wanted to create a platform for youth and not only for stars in the field.
“We wanted to invite both professionals and enthusiasts to engage with architecture and design. What could be more accessible than cinema? Disciplines build walls around themselves, and we hoped to create some porosity,” said festival curator Samta Nadeem.
Apart from films, the event included talks, panel discussions, installations, exhibits, workshops, performances and a visit to an art gallery. Gupta said, “We have a lot of industry initiatives like trade fairs, but there is a huge gap when it comes to dialogue and discourse. When I attended ADFF in New York three years ago, I thought we needed it in India to have meaningful conversations and cultural commentary about how the built environment is perceived, and how it will be perceived in the future.”
Some of the films screened explored a singular artist or designer’s practice in depth. Among these were Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea (2024), Valentina B. Ganeva’s Schindler Space Architect (2024), Afdhel Aziz’s The Genius of the Place: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Bawa (2023), Jan Schmidt-Garre’s The Promise: Architect BV Doshi (2023), Stéphane Ghez’s Charlotte Perriand: Pioneer in the Art of Living (2019), and Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003).
While each film worked as a stand-alone experience, the programming also intended for them to be in conversation with others. In the film about Indian architect BV Doshi, for instance, his mentor Le Corbusier—the French architect who created the master plan for Chandigarh — is invoked as someone to be venerated. However, in the film about Irish architect Eileen Gray, who built an avant-garde house by the sea, Le Corbusier comes across as an insecure man threatened by the brilliance of a female contemporary. He painted murals on the villa which Gray viewed as an act of vandalism.
Doshi, a towering figure in the history of Indian architecture, assisted Louis Kahn as well when the latter designed the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Kahn’s son Nathaniel was at the festival to speak about his father’s work, which is the subject of his film, My Architect. Incidentally, Nathaniel’s mother Harriet Pattison too was an architect.
The film on Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa found a suitable companion in photographer Dayanita Singh’s exhibition Photo Lies, which was hosted not at the NCPA but at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya where festival attendees were taken for a walk through. Singh, who is interested in how both architecture as well as photography play with light, included photographs of the Kandalama hotel designed by Bawa in her exhibition. Bawa’s “tropical modernism” is highly respected by practitioners of sustainable architecture and environmentally conscious design, as it uses locally available building materials, incorporates rainwater harvesting systems, and uses energy-saving cooling techniques.
The relationship between the built environment and the natural one was explored in Francesca Molteni and Mattia Colombo’s documentary, Green Over Gray (2024), on the work of Argentinian-American artist Emilio Ambasz, a pioneer of green architecture. It is also the theme of Rikke Selin Als and Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s documentary, Making a Mountain (2020), about Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s project CopenHill — a man-made mountain, “the world’s cleanest waste-to-energy plant, with a rooftop ski slope”.
Nature lovers had a chance to enjoy Ataliba Benaim and Fernanda Heinz Figueiredo’s film Biocentrics (2022), which draws attention to a practice called biomimicry that involves drawing lessons from nature to devise strategies and processes to solve human problems.
Also on the schedule was Becky Hutner’s film Fashion Reimagined (2022) about award-winning London fashion designer Amy Powney whose conscience pushed her to transform her business model and create an ethical and sustainable collection. This journey involved learning about the supply chain and confronting issues such as deforestation, farmer suicide and animal mutilation.
The festival had a corner set up by brothers Parminder Pal Singh and Sukhvinder Singh, co-founders of Loco Design, to show how waste generated within the design industry can be transformed into “treasured objects that tell unique stories, whilst minimising impact on the environment”. Their sustainable brand, Caur, creates “excessories” out of materials such as leather, wood and metals that are left over from manufacturing processes.
The session titled “Sustainable Fashion: Reality versus Rhetoric” had articulate and entertaining panelists in Sanjay Garg, Founder of Raw Mango, a label that works with karigars across Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, and Mevin Murden, who is the Director of Education at Istituto Marangoni School of Fashion and Design in Mumbai. It was moderated by design curator and creative brand strategist Kamna Malik.
Garg took delight in being provocative. He said, “What does ‘sustainable’ really mean? What are we sustaining? Some people think they are more intelligent and woke than others. They know what’s happening in London and Los Angeles but not their neighbourhood in Gurgaon.” He called sustainability “a sales gimmick” by people who cater to South Mumbai and South Delhi and have no connection with places like Kanpur and Nashik. Murden pointed out that clothing marked as sustainable is often quite expensive, and out of reach for most people. “It must be made more accessible if we want more people to adopt and embrace it,” he added.
Another session, titled Occupy! Making Space of/for/by the Subaltern, examined the politics of space with Ambedkarite artist Siddhesh Gautam, Sudheer Rajbhar, founder of Chamar Studio, Aravani Art Project team members Poornima Sukumar and Karnika Bai, and Priya Dali, Creative Director of Gaysi Family. Moderated by artist and writer Ranjana Dave, the panel looked at practices of exclusion and reclaiming in the city.
A city is more than its architecture; it is nothing without its people, neighbourhoods, and communities. The festival had an interactive corner set up by the youth group Blue Ribbon Movement, where visitors could play a card game called Aamchi Mumbai. It was designed with the aim of enabling citizens to connect more deeply with their city as a shared space and take responsibility for making it a more beautiful place for themselves and fellow citizens.
Another wonderful component of the festival was a pop-up intervention by Juhu Reads, a silent reading community that meets once a week at the Kaifi Azmi Park in Juhu. Diya Sengupta, founder and co-curator of Juhu Reads, said, “The festival’s themes around sustainability, design, and open spaces felt like a natural extension of what Juhu Reads stands for.” Participants were welcome to read anything of their choice, without any gatekeepers of taste prescribing must-reads or dismissing titles that do not measure up to their personal standards. Sengupta views this reading community as a refuge for people who “want to rekindle their relationship with reading” and for people who want to be silent but “never solitary”.
The first edition of the festival in Mumbai was memorable because of its novelty. One hopes that future editions will bring in more films, architects and designers from India’s neighbours and other countries in the Global South if they are serious about being truly international.
Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based journalist who writes about books, art and culture. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
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