Copenhagen Architecture Festival CAFx 2016

The Copenhagen Architecture Festival opens this Wednesday March 9th for the third time. The festival has grown rapidly and is now the biggest festival of its kind (I guess we like it big here in Copenhagen), focusing on architecture and film: 150 events, 90 films and 35 venues in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Aalborg.

Themes this year span from gentrification, sound and space, the life and poetics of the architect, past and future urban planning, to co-creation, Chinese megacities and transformations of Copenhagen. There will by lectures, talks, radio cinema and podcasts created for specific walks, lots of possibilities to discover unknown spots around the city and a fine program for children as well.

I won’t miss out on the screening of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977), her New York tableaux accompanied by her reading letters from her mother – Cinemateket will also be showing her last film No Home Movie (2015) in March, so that’s two Akerman films in a month. I look forward to the program curated and introduced by Danish sound engineer Peter Albrechtsen, in particular Blade Runner, the 2007 final director’s cut with an optimised soundtrack. Then there is old punk portrayer Julien Temple’s collage London, The Modern Babylon (2012) and a Danish premiere of Mark Cousins’ I am Belfast (2015). Documentary directors Kaspar Astrup Schröder and Michael Madsen give us a chance to follow their current projects: Astrup Schröder by showing a work-in-progress version of Big Time, his portrait of Danish superstar architect Bjarke Ingels, and Madsen will do a talk about his next film/philosophical experiment Odyssey that involves spaceships and the future of humankind. Oh and then I have to see L’Inhumaine, Marcel L’Herbier’s 1924 French avant-garde science fiction, a silent movie masterpiece with a set design by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Fernand Léger, screened with a new electronic live soundtrack on Sunday March 20.

The opening film is the award-winning Concrete Love: The Böhm Family (2014) by Maurizius Staerkle Drux, a portrait of Germany’s most prominent architect Gottfried Böhm and his family (PHOTO). Love, art and architecture! Take a look at the trailer: https://vimeo.com/117273601

CAFx March 10-20 in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Aalborg.

Check out the program: http://cafx.dk/