Directing
Koolhaas Houselife portrays one of the masterpieces of contemporary architecture. The film lets the viewer enter into the house's daily intimacy through the stories and daily chores of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper, and the other people who look after the building. Pungent, funny and touching.
25 BIS is an intimate portrait of a masterpiece from the beginning of Auguste Perret’s career: the building located on 25 Bis, Rue Franklin in Paris. The film looks for the intangible and subjective element of the building’s history: the depth of its human print. The building appears as a sedimentation of life stories where each layer has left the trace of a passage. From the intimate nature of these stories, the film draws this fragile and undefined essence that could be called “the soul of the place”.
Copenhagen’s “8 House,” an ultramodern loop of apartments created by architect Bjarke Ingels, reinvents the concept of “home.” Its 500 residents can traverse all nine floors by bike while their kids attend kindergarten on the ground floor. This exuberant documentary profiles the (mostly) happy residents, including a group of children who experience the best scavenger hunt ever, offering a hopeful, inspired picture of communal living by design.
After the trying constraints of lockdown and social distancing that brutally reduced urban space to its strict minimum, making it into a place where isolated individuals merely cohabit, Homo Urbanus is a cinematic odyssey offering a vibrant tribute to what we have been most cruelly deprived of: namely, public space. Taking the form of a free-wheeling journey around the world (10 films, 10 cities), the project invites us to observe in detail the multiple forms and complex interactions that exist every day between people and their urban environments. Somewhere between visual anthropology and observational cinema, these films put urban man under the microscope and encourage us to take a closer look at individual and collective behaviour, interpersonal dynamics, social tensions, and the economic and political forces that play out every day on the grand stage of the city streets.
One week in the extraordinary-ordinary life of Mr. Moriyama, a Japanese art, architecture and music enlighted amateur who lives in one of the most famous contemporary Japanese architecture, the Moriyama house, built in Tokyo in 2005 by Pritzker-prize winner Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). Introduced in the intimacy of this experimental microcosm which redefines completely the common sense of domestic life, Ila Bêka recounts in a very spontaneous and personal way the unique personality of the owner: a urban hermit living in a small archipelago of peace and contemplation in the heart of Tokyo. From noise music to experimental movies, the film let us enter into the ramification of the Mr. Moriyama's free spirit. Moriyama-San, the first film about noise music, acrobatic reading, silent movies, fireworks and Japanese architecture!
Second project of the Living Architectures series, [featured in the MoMA] Pomerol, Herzog & de Meuron takes us to the party atmosphere of mealtime among the grape-pickers in the dining hall designed by Herzog & de Meuron in Pomerol for one of the most prestigious vineyards in the world. A real punch of vitality!
Revisiting the genre of the road movie in a very diaristic and personal way, the film takes us on board architect Ryue Nishizawa’s vintage Alfa Romeo (Giulia) for a day long wandering in the streets of Tokyo.
ButoHouse is a film about concrete, illumination, perseverance and hope.
Bêka & Lemoine continue their Homo Urbanus series of films about various world cities and their inhabitants, this time exploring the humans of Lisbon, the Portuguese capital.
Khlong Toei is one of Bangkok's central districts, home to the largest slum in the exponentially growing Thai metropolis. The place, which accommodates 100,000 inhabitants, could at first glance be characterised by chaos, overcrowding and pollution. However, the pure, immersive observation of the masterful duo Bêka & Lemoine, capturing the rhythms of day and night life in this fascinating environment, proves that it is in fact a living organism in which order reigns and time passes slowly but surely.
Recounting her personal story as a young girl who spent her childhood in rehabilitation centres alongside her severely disabled father, Louise Lemoine confronts her traumatic memories with the exceptional experimentation developed at REHAB in Basel, a building built twenty years ago by Herzog & de Meuron.
A video diary of a month-long immersion in the life of the Barbican, from the top floors of the towers to the underground levels of the arts centre. An intimate and lively map of this brutalist masterpiece.
Artist-filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine take us to Bangkok on a one day hectic journey through the chaotic concrete jungle of the South-Asian megacity. Led by the moving personal story of Boonserm Premthada, one of today's most important Thai architects, the film unfolds through a free wander, punctuated by stunning encounters, events and places, which have contributed to shape Premthada's unique identity and sensibility. Deaf from birth, the architect evokes how his disability led him to develop an alternative way of listening using his whole body as a resonance chamber of sound vibrations. Despite their large ears, elephants also perceive sound mostly through their feet. Learning from elephants, Boonserm has developed an architecture of the senses where sound vibrations become the voice of space.
The fifth project of the Living Architectures series, Inside Piano is composed of three films on three symbolic buildings of Renzo Piano's career. A visit throughout the prototype-building of the Centre Pompidou. An immersion in the soundproof world of a submarine floating in the depths of the Parisian underground. A journey aboard a luminous magic carpet of a highly sophisticated architectural machine. A humorous, caustic and quirky point of view.
Paris, Place de la République, 40 years after Louis Malle's documentary and only one year after the huge renewal project by architects TVK which transformed this well known buzzy crossroads into a new urban oasis for the Parisian city dweller.
The Sense of Tuning is a portrait of the architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, conceived like a sketch made on the fly, captured in the vibrancy of movement and of the moment. Nothing of a hagiographic portrait giving a fixed image of the man and his work, the film explores the fragile, precious material of the architect’s sensibility with rare spontaneity, shedding light on how his perception of the emotion of space is nurtured. Conceived as a performative cinematic experience, this film captures the alchemy of a day-long encounter between Bijoy Jain and Bêka & Lemoine – twelve hours of intense wandering, plunging us into the vital energy of the streets of Mumbai. Visual notes made in the intimacy of the studio, observations of informal tactics of the city and visits to production sites, the film reveals how closely Bijoy Jain’s work is tied to the city of Mumbai, providing endless resources and inspiration. A sensory film where gesture becomes the language of intuition.
