The third Architecture & Design Film Festival runs Thursday through Monday, April 12 through 16, at Music Box, with 31 films screening in 15 different programs. Tickets are $11, with packages available for $45 (five tickets) and $90 (13 tickets). Following are selected films screening; for a full schedule see adfilmfest.com.
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Detroit Wild City French filmmaker Florent Tillon calls RoboCop one of his favorite movies, but his 2010 documentary owes little to Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 Motor City dystopia. In place of gunfire and anomie, this ruminative video essay spotlights rebirth among the ruins. Below the elevated train in abandoned downtown Detroit, a young explorer acts as tour guide along blocks of architectural skeletons, rummaging through the artifacts left behind when businesses fled. With fewer people and cars, space for animals and agriculture has returned: urban farmers reclaim large patches of empty land, and a pheasant, goats—even a horse—find homes in backyards. How long this new Eden will last is anyone’s guess, but judging by the ranks of the creative class flocking to his nightclub, owner Larry Mongo suspects that gentrification is not far away. —Andrea Gronvall 80 min. Fru 4/13, 5 PM, and Sat 4/14, 9:15 PM
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History Completed in 1954 and demolished in 1972, the 33-building Pruitt-Igoe housing project in Saint Louis has been used to support diverse social theories—that government funding is bad; that modernist architecture fails; that poor blacks are irresponsible—all of which are debunked in this affecting documentary by Chad Freidrichs. The city’s population peaked at the time the project was completed, and Saint Louis quickly emptied out as whites fled to the suburbs; as the project’s maintenance funding declined, elevators stopped working and it became a crime-infested ruin (which some residents still remember with great fondness). The opening, which shows the mix of forest and rubble where the homes once stood, is especially poetic, its empty spaces later filled in for the viewer with archival footage of the project, lovely initially but gutted in its later years. —Fred Camper 83 min. Fri 4/13, 9 PM, and Mon 4/16, 7:15 PM
