The best of Doc Fest’s documentaries on Architecture screened in the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao

The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with Rome’s DOC FEST, is proud to present a selection of documentary films on architecture, curated by Antonella Greco and Veronica Fragola, and chosen from the past editions of the Festival di Palazzo Venezia – International Documentary Festival on the Arts.
Space and volume, light and darkness, ensembles and details are themes which belong as much to architecture as the do to cinema.
The union of these two forms of expression/communication through the documentary film has thus always been ingrained within them.
Circumnavigating an architectural work, descending into the intimacy of its inner spaces, revealing its possible or impossible walkways, and traveling along its light shafts and its volumes, are all among the prime duties of the documentary filmmaker.
Recreating, through visual movement, the three-dimensionality of matter within the bi-dimensionality of the screen is a challenge which has always fascinated and vexed that Man With a Movie Camera, who, not being able to rely on Vertovian hypotheses or impressionistic synthesis, chooses to combine his own talent with that of the architect, permeating the structure with his own visual talent rather than embellishing it or overlapping it.
Clarity, simplicity, lucidity, and the meaning to be transmitted by the film are what bring the director to that narrow path which he has chosen for himself, a sometimes arduous journey which is so important in achieving that synthesis which the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum presents us today in this documentary film showcase.

Rubino Rubini