Italomodern – Design

Chair Times

"Chair Times" charts a course through an ocean of chairs. In the focus are 125 objects from the Collection of the Vitra Design Museum. Arranged according to their year of production, they illustrate development from 1807 to the very latest designs straight off the 3D printer, forming a timeline to modern seating design. The film features many people whose vocations involve design and who are experts in the field, such as designers Hella Jongerius, Antonio Citterio and Ronan Bouroullec, architects and collectors Arthur Rüegg and Ruggero Tropeano, architect David Chipperfield, Director Emeritus of MAK Vienna/Los Angeles Peter Noever, Mateo Kries, Director of the Vitra Design Museum, Vitra Design Museum curators Amelie Klein, Jochen Eisenbrand and collection curator Serge Mauduit. And your guide through the history of chairs is Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra.

Bauhaus 100

In 1919 an art school opened in Germany that would change the world forever. It was called the Bauhaus. A century later, its radical thinking still shapes our lives today. Bauhaus 100 is the story of Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus, and the teachers and students he gathered to form this influential school. Traumatised by his experiences during the Great War, and determined that technology should never again be used for destruction, Gropius decided to reinvent the way art and design were taught. At the Bauhaus, all the disciplines would come together to create the buildings of the future, and define a new way of living in the modern world.

Vladimir Kagan: A Life of Design

This portrait of Vladimir Kagan-noted furniture designer, sculptor, and writer-documents his creative process, from initial drawings and design ideas through the creation of the Gigi and Gabriella chairs. His long career and continued inventiveness had a seminal influence on Twentieth Century design.

Routes: Exploring the British Origins of Newfoundland Outport Furniture Design

A 1995 David Quinton film exploring the British origins of Newfoundland outport furniture design.

Lamps

Watch your eyes...

Take a seat

Yin Honqiang, a master carpenter from Jiangyin, has been working with wood for over 50 years. Along with his son and his grandson, they create handcrafted pieces of furniture of the highest level, what lead them to be one of the most important furniture makers in all of China. Take a seat is a close look at their way of working while keeping the tradition alive throughout generations.

Concrete Forms of Resistance

Filmed in Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon the city’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the mid-1960s. Progress and crisis, labour and capital, material and memory, are reflected through a very intelligent rhyme between image and sound. The touching voice and words of Niemeyer as a call for life, and the beautiful camerawork as a weaving of ghosts in the present landscapes.

De A’dammer - De man achter de kast

The A’dammer - The Man Behind the Cabinet follows the life of designer Aldo van den Nieuwelaar. He designed the iconic A’dammer cabinet, an international design icon, with over seventy versions sold worldwide. Museums acquired his work, and he became a promising name in the design world. But Aldo was more of an artist than an entrepreneur, and his perfectionism clashed with commercial interests. His tense relationship with director Harm Scheltens of furniture manufacturer Pastoe, in particular, escalated into a years-long legal battle over money, recognition, and control.

Chairs

Absolutely NO tables. What else were you expecting?

Ödipussi

Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.

That Brennan Girl

Raised by Natalie Brennan, a flamboyant and irresponsible mother, Ziggy Brennan gets involved in hustling men at a young age. She hangs around with a wild crowd and learns gets her "street smarts" first from her mother, who wants everyone to think they are sisters, and then from Denny Reagan, an older man. He starts teaching her his tricks of the trade and she falls right in line with his crooked ways. Then one night she meets Martin J. 'Mart' Neilson, a tall, handsome, honest farmer boy who's a sailor and they fall in love. While he's away fighting the war, she discovers she's pregnant.

La importancia de un sofá

Manuela and her mother have different ways of perceiving the world they live in. They discuss masculinity, love, and, as if that were not enough, the importance of a sofa.

Brother's Shadow

Jake Groden is the black sheep of his family. Ankle deep in fish guts, he serves out his parole in Alaska. Then, after a decade of self-imposed exile, he is forced to return to his Brooklyn family. He soon discovers that his perfect brother, Michael is dead, and he begins trying to take what Michael had- a beautiful wife, adoring son, control of the family furniture business and the love of their gruff father. For Jake, the price of a new life is his identity.

Ed Gein

The true story of Edward Gein, the farmer whose horrific crimes inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. This is the first film to Gein's tormented upbringing, his adored but domineering mother, and the 1957 arrest uncovered the most bizarre series of murders America has ever seen

Hide and Go Shriek

A group of teenagers spend the night in a furniture shop for a graduation party. When one of them talks her boyfriend into a game of hide-and-seek, a psycho killer starts hunting them down one by one.

Matakot Ka sa Karma

About an antique shop where the pieces of the furniture each have their own stories from the past. The new owners get their little piece of horror. Aleli purchases an antique bed, not realizing that its previous owner of the bed is out to claim her son. A couple purchased an antique cabinet where a young man died inside before. An independent woman gets a possessed dresser out to take her soul.

Meet the Stewarts

A young, newlywed couple learns to make their marriage work—on a budget.

Cauchemar capitonné

An antique chair with a dark history possesses more than just kitschy charm.

The Chair

After Reese brings home an antique chair, a series of horrific events follow, leading him to question if it's a malevolent spirit the chair possesses or the darkness inside his own mind.