BARQ FESTIVAL, AN ACT OF LOVE FOR CINEMA AND ARCHITECTURE

The third edition of the BARQ Festival, Barcelona International Architecture Film Festival, from 26 September to 1 October 2023, highlights social emergencies through documentary film and architecture. The winning film will travel to Madrid on 18 October for a special screening and subsequent discussion with film director and architect Fernando Colomo.

What would happen if your city was about to collapse due to a mine? What if the building your late father built was now occupied by homeless people? Can trees empower racial segregation and racism? Is love stronger than economic and urban inequalities?

The third edition of the BARQ Festival, the Barcelona International Architecture Film Festival highlights social emergencies through documentary film and architecture. The festival will be held from 26 September to 1 October 2023 in Barcelona, and for the second year running, the winning film will travel to Madrid on 18 October for a special screening and subsequent discussion with film director and architect Fernando Colomo.

Since 2021, the production company Nihao Films has been organizing the BARQ Festival, the only architecture film festival in Spain, offering a selection of high-quality documentaries from around the world. The co-director of the festival, Pep Martín, emphasizes: “BARQ awakens more interest every year; more institutions and new audiences from all over Spain join the project, and this is good because you feel more observed and it forces you to improve”. After three editions, BARQ has managed to increase its program, almost doubling the number of films and parallel activities.

This year, six feature films and twelve short films will compete for recognition as the best short and feature-length documentary film of the year.

This year, six feature films and twelve short films will compete for recognition as the best short and feature-length architectural documentary film at the third edition of the BARQ Festival.

The competition will kick off at Barcelona’s Disseny Hub, where Denise Zmekhol’s “Skin of Glass” will be screened, a documentary that will inaugurate the festival and tackle the problems related to housing in Brazil.

The festival will also host four more feature films out of competition, in the form of parallel activities and special sessions. Highlights include the preview of the documentary “Ricardo Bofill: La hoja en blanco”, an RTVE production directed by Manel Arranz and Elisabeth Anglarill, about the late, internationally renowned Catalan architect; and the short film “Arquitectura emocional 1959”, winner of the Goya Award for Best Fiction Short Film 2022.

In this edition, the festival has opted for presentiality; for this reason, only part of the program will be available on Filmin. The co-director of BARQ, Pep Martín, remarks: “After the impact of the pandemic, little by little, festivals must return to the cinemas, where, in addition to the documentary, you can enjoy the live presence of directors and experts and the essence of a festival“. During this third edition, most of the sessions will include a colloquium with the directors, and the public will be able to talk about the different themes.

This year’s venues are the Cinemes Girona, the COAC Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña, and the Disseny Hub de Barcelona. As a novelty, the Cinema Zumzeig has also been added as a venue for the festival, where “Light Without Sun”, by Clara Kraft Isono, Marie Ramsing, and Christopher Sejer Fischlein, will be screened as part of one of the special sessions and parallel activities of the festival.

The initiative has the collaboration of leading institutions in the world of architecture such as the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, the Arquin-FAD association, the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, the Arquia Foundation, and the ICO Foundation, among others.