Architecture 17th MFDF Ji.hlava

photo: ECHTarchitektura

“Good harvest,” such was the subtitle of this year’s seventeenth edition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. The festival reminded us that, like a good farmer, the documentary film supports — cultivates — and of course, primarily symbolically harvests what has grown in the field of documentary films, in the garden, or in the orchard. The traditionally striking graphic visual by Juraj Horváth was colorful and straightforwardly employed motifs of fruits and vegetables in many forms.
There is still no change in the trend of cultural neglect in our country. Thus, the festival is created with steadily diminishing financial backing. For the architectural form of the festival, this means a focus on the pragmatic needs of creating temporary interiors for the festival center and visual advertising of the festival's presence in the city’s public space. All this while attempting to implement strategies of borrowed construction elements and sponsor-obtained materials, which naturally leads to a “low-budget” somewhat punk effect.
The agricultural stylization of the 17th edition of the festival was thus complemented by interiors created using classic colorful fruit crates or a fruit-vegetable orientation system at the festival center, in which the OGV building (Regional Gallery of Vysočina) was transformed. The concept went into such details as packing festival t-shirts into jars, whose printed lid also served as a badge.
In the exteriors, we were forced to abandon the originally consistent agricultural concept at the last moment and improvise alternative solutions. The coincidence with the premature parliamentary elections brought about a supposed similarity of our architectural visuals with certain elements of a political party's campaign, and the apolitical festival, for understandable reasons, proactively avoided possible political connotations. It’s a pity, as we didn’t notice anything similar to our intentions in Jihlava during the pre-election campaign.
In the public space of the city, at least significantly colorful, evening-glowing banners from the so-called IBC containers appeared in the end. They marked individual festival locations or, like the object in the square as a variably blinking banner-gate, reminded passersby of the festival’s occurrence.