learning to unlearn
[festival theme]

Architecture accommodates cultures and people from all walks of life but it often fails to consider pressing issues such as social justice, ecological crisis and decolonisation over a dominant Western paradigm on architectural education and practice. The 11th edition of Arquiteturas Film Festival seeks to challenge this hegemony, by reflecting on these entrenched discourses within the field.

We invite audiences on a captivating cinematic journey through the complexities of architectural knowledge production and its societal impact, exploring how architecture can contribute to reimagining conventional forms of representation, questioning extractivist practices and dismantling colonial narratives.

→ instituto
[festival organiser]

INSTITUTO is a focal point for different forms of cultural expression, located in the heart of Porto. The team’s interests and backgrounds have given rise to a programme that diverges from the field of architecture to encompass the visual and spatial arts, critical thinking and multidisciplinary collaborations. We seek to encourage the creation and exploration of new contemporary discourses through interdisciplinarity, the informality of the space and the will to tackle burning issues in today’s society.

Since 2021, INSTITUTO has taken up the challenge of organising and reinventing the former Arquiteturas Film Festival. Now in Porto, the festival is cementing its reputation as an international platform for discussing and disseminating architectural production through films, exhibitions and debates.

→ bêka & lemoine
[guest directors]

We are thrilled to announce Bêka & Lemoine as Guest Directors of the Arquiteturas Film Festival 2024. Focusing their interest mainly on how the built environment shapes and influences our daily life, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine have developed a very unique and personal approach which can be defined, in reference to French writer Georges Perec, as an "anthropology of the ordinary". Presented by The New York Times as the "cult figures in the European architecture world", Bêka & Lemoine's work has been widely acclaimed as "a new form of criticism" (Mark) which "has deeply changed the way of looking at architecture" (Domus).

→locument
[curators, official programme]

AFF welcomes LOCUMENT as the Guest Curators of this 11th edition! Using architecture and film as analytical, critical and subversive tools, this research studio combines filmmaking with architecture and urban research. Diving into stories that reflect on problems that resonate throughout the globe, their work focuses on recreating the complex storyline hidden under the surface of the visible spectrum.