Stages 2025
In 2025, AFFR again zooms in on urgent spatial questions through three carefully curated program lines, each offering a unique perspective on architecture’s relationship with power, heritage, and environmental impact, explored through critically selected films and expert introduction: Villain Strategies, Playing with Ruins en Hidden Costs.
The powerful documentaries in Villain Strategies expose how architecture can be weaponised, not just symbolically, but through highly specific strategies of displacement, exploitation and cultural appropriation. From Cape Town and New York, to Jerusalem and Damascus, these films trace the exact mechanisms behind spatial injustice: legal loopholes, aesthetic mandates, state-sanctioned redevelopment, intimidation, and the deliberate rewriting of history. Rather than focusing on the damage, Villain Strategies unpacks the playbook through which architecture becomes a tool of systemic oppression.
Playing with Ruins brings together films that engage with architecture in various states of decay, transition or reclamation – from post-war destruction and neglected heritage to colonial remnants and contemporary abandoned buildings. Stories that are intimate, playful or defiant, but all of them deeply rooted in place and ask how architecture can become a carrier of both loss and renewal. Ruins don’t have to be remants of the past, but also fertile ground for imagination, memory and reinvention.
The films comprising the programme Hidden Costs make visible the often overlooked consequences of climate change, the energy transition, and large-scale infrastructures. From the drowning of ancient villages and the quiet displacement of communities, to the geopolitics of hydrogen and the polarising return of nuclear energy, these stories reveal how progress extracts a toll from ecosystems, but also from histories, homes, and the people who live closest to the edge. Hidden Costs is an invitation to reckon with human ambition, environmental impact and the urgent need for a reality check.
Villain Strategies
Mother City
The legacy of apartheid is alive and well in the urbanism of Cape Town, where Reclaim The City activists are fighting a David versus Goliath battle against spatial injustice. A fascinating portrait of bravery in the face of violence, racism and corruption.
Slumlord Millionaire
A portrait of the power of developers and injustice in (social) housing in New York, but also the community activism that arises against it. Told from the perspective of three smart and assertive women of colour.
Rule of Stone
Dispossession by design. An investigation into the importance of Jerusalem stone, a material that architects must use to give Jerusalem its unique aesthetic quality. A story about the direct political implications of architecture, and of stone in particular.
Shorts: Banality of Evil & Intro Charlie Clemoes
Evil often arises from the most petty actions and seemingly harmless technologies. In this film programme you will see three fascinating stories about (small-scale) evil: you learn how a fake city in Germany is used as a training base against the IRA, how a neighbourhood in Syria is demolished out of revenge, and about the arbitrary decisions that have to be made by the workers who ‘control’ self-driving cars.
Playing with Ruins
The Castle
An indestructible dream castle – that’s how three Sicilian children see their self-built home in the ruins of a nursery on the edge of Palermo. A hopeful portrait of children who, through play, shape their own future.
The Lions By The River Tigris
Amid the ruins of post-ISIS Mosul, three men strive to rebuild not just the city, but also its soul. A fisherman clings to a carved marble lintel, a collector dreams of turning it into a museum piece, and a musician teaches once forbidden songs to a new generation.
The Wall
An elderly man in Palestine tries to keep the wall in front of his house as tidy as possible. Again and again, graffiti appears on it. Each time, he paints over it until he realizes something: the wall is a means of communication for the neighbourhood.
Yalla Parkour
Young people in Gaza film themselves as they reclaim their destroyed surroundings, with Parkour as a form of playful protest and ruins as a playground. A painful reminder of what was, yet full of small moments of joy.
Hidden Costs
Black Water
As far as the horizon reaches we see water – where once there were villages, fields and people. Lokhi decides to move with her family to Dhaka, the fastest growing city in the world. A shocking view of an apocalyptic world.
Hydrogen – Revolution or Illusion?
An eye-opening investigation into hydrogen’s role in the global energy transition, exposing the political, economic and ecological complexities behind this controversial clean solution of the future.
Shifting Baselines
Boca Chica, Texas – also known as Starbase, the launch base of Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX. While Musk dreams of a journey to Mars, the nearby nature reserve is plagued by pollution. Shifting Baselines tells a nuanced story, but one in which the shadows of nostalgia and colonialism are never far away.
Shorts: Landscapes After Us & Klimaat Academie Rotterdam Debate
These four documentaries argue for a radically different relationship between humans and nature. From a solarpunk-like plea for unity with nature, via a confronting visual essay on the waste our society produces, to a hopeful future in which technology and landscape together create space for renewed connection.
The Town That Drove Away
Due to the Ilisu dam project in Turkey, the historic village of Hasankeyf will be submerged. A brand-new Hasankeyf is being rebuilt further from the Tigris. The large, modern houses initially seem like progress, but soon the villagers are struck by homesickness.