Chicago welcomes the return of annual Architecture Film Festival

It gets pretty well-chronicled whenever Chicago loses something — be it a corporation moving away, or a trade show choosing a sunbelt metropolis over McCormick Place.

In that light, it’s good to see the international Architecture & Design Film Festival returning to Chicago this week after a nine-year absence.

The fest, which runs Wednesday through Sunday at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 E. Wacker Dr., features 15 films from around the world.

Subjects include architecture, fashion, housing and urban planning.

“It’s great to be back,” ADFF Founder and Executive Director Kyle Bergman told us. “I think everyone knows Chicago is an architecture town. But it’s a film town too.”

Festival is a good addition to city’s arts scene

The 14-year-old traveling film festival was last in Chicago in 2014. Bergman said his organization had trouble raising sponsorship cash here after that.

“But it was always our best audience,” he said of the city.

This year’s offerings were culled from 350 submissions, Bergman said. In addition to the 15 featured movies — which require a paid admission — a series of 12 short films will play on a continuous loop for free in the Chicago Architecture Center’s public areas, said CAC CEO Eleanor Esser Gorski.

The festival “will be like going on a mini-vacation around the world,” she said. “We’ve got fashion and design, something for every one.”

A trio of Chicago-themed movies are scheduled, including “Committee of Six,” a 40-minute re-enactment of the private 1955 meetings that created the still-controversial University of Chicago-led urban renewal efforts designed to curb the rising Black population in Hyde Park.

The movie’s dialog is taken from the actual minutes of the meetings.

“[The movie] is about some of the origins of the issues that we’re still talking about, even with the Obama Library,” Gorski said.

“You can hear the institutional racism,” Bergman said.

The two other Chicago films are two shorts: “Ford House,” a five-minute look at the fascinating midcentury experimental Aurora home designed by architect Bruce Goff, and “Paraíso,” which examines the dangerous yet compelling work of three immigrants who clean the exterior windows of the city’s tallest skyscrapers.

Panel discussions are also planned for the festival.

The return of the Architecture & Design Film Festival might not be as big as trying to land an Olympics bid or hosting a giant NASCAR race downtown.

But the event is among the many modest but important moves that are needed to bolster Chicago’s reputation as showplace for the arts.

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