SECTIONS // OVERVIEW OF THE SPANISH DOCUMENTARY

THE COMPETITION

Angel Borrego Cubero
90' / 2013 / Spain
Web: www.o-s-s.org
English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese
English and spanish subtitled

A raw account of how some of the world's leading architects, giants such as Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, struggle to beat the competition for the National Art Museum in Andorra. The presentations before the jury take place in a single intense day in the run-up to the elections in Andorra, making this a significant event for this tiny country; this is both a fascinating study of the personality and strategy of each starchitect…and a dramatic instant in which each detail is both important and irrelevant, and the frontier between success and failure is perfectly imperceptible.
Although almost as old as the profession itself, architectural competitions became a social, political and cultural phenomenon of the property bubble in the post-Guggenheim Bilbao era. Set at the dramatic moment when the property crash developed into a global crisis, this is the first architecture competition whose processes have been documented in a film, thereby creating an unclassifiable work of art -simultaneously an intense thriller, an ethnographic report and a cult film featuring some of the icons of contemporary architecture.

Main Festivals & Awards

Festival de Arquitectura y Cine de Roterdam (AFFR) 2013 - Selección oficial y apertura
Festival de Arquitectura y Cine de Copenhague (CAFF) 2014 - Selección oficial y apertura

Director's Biography

Ángel Borrego Cubero (Spain, 1967) was trained as an architect, and has a doctorate from the ETSA in Madrid and a MA from Princeton University, where he was a Fulbright scholar. His trajectory is broader and more diverse than the discipline of architecture alone, and his works explore themes such as the contemporary urban condition, the negotiations between private and public space, violence, surveillance, and fictions in architecture. Using mainly site-specific installations, new media and video installations, his work has been exhibited in leading international venues such as the ARCO Art Fair, the Reina Sofía Museum, LABoral , Artium etc. In 1999 he founded the Office for Strategic Spaces (OSS), an art and architecture studio that has designed projects such as Urban Space Station, the Matadero Madrid Cultural Factory, exhibition spaces such as Filipiniana in the Conde Duque Cultural Centre, Feed Forward in LABoral Gijón, the San José Biennial in California, the planning strategy of Solar Decathlon Madrid etc. The Competition is the first feature film by this Spanish director and also the first film to document the gripping sequence of events surrounding architecture competitions.

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