ByDesign Festival is a cross-cultural exploration of people, structures, and ideas at the intersection of design and the moving image.

Featuring a broad, inclusive selection of films, performances, and interactive activities, ByDesign invites festivalgoers to interrogate their own relationships to personal and collective identity, by examining how humanity’s understanding of itself is central to the ways in which it creates the physical world.

The 2022 edition of Northwest Film Forum’s annual ByDesign Festival, held March 17–20 in-person and March 17–27 online, is curated and promoted in close partnership with Seattle Design Festival, a strategic initiative of AIA Seattle dedicated to unleashing the design thinker in everyone.

Mar. 17 at 7pm
Waiting for the Carnival (Estou me guardando para quando o Carnaval chegar)
(Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2019, 86 min, in Portuguese with English subtitles)
Presented by Travessias Brazilian Film Festival, with the support of UW Center for Brazilian Studies

Amid a frenetic and near-constant manufacturing cycle for denim jeans, the denizens of Toritama, in Pernambuco, have one major respite to look forward to: Carnival.

Mar. 18 at 7pm
Americaville
(Adam James Smith, US, China & United Kingdom, 2020, 80 min, in English & Chinese with English subtitles)

Americaville is an eerie disclosure of the Chinese replica city of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where citizens escape to experience the American dream. Each weekend, Beijing residents travel there to enjoy fresh air, a big house, and classic “American” activities: morning walks on Route 66, Jello potlucks, et cetera. But just as in America, the sheen of a bought-and-sold lifestyle can’t last forever.

Mar. 19 at 4:30pm
Desert Paradise (Paradijs in de Woestijn)
(Ike Bertels, Netherlands, 2020, 87 min, in Afrikaans, English & Occitan with English subtitles)
US premiere!

The remote town of Oranjemund in the Namibian desert, long reliant on a local diamond mine for everything from education to public utilities, is thrown into limbo when the mine closes. Residents make an effort to fill the vacuum by fostering local economies of tourism and farming, but independence is a hard thing to build from scratch.

Mar. 19 & 20 at 6pm
Show Me the Change: Short Film Program

How do physical objects and built-environments synchronously shape and reflect the emotional spaces in which we dwell? This collection of shorts, color-coded memories, embodied explorations, and culturally-conscious rearrangements honors the stories of those seeking expression, protection, and connection.

• Colour Study (Anthem Jackson (Graham Kew & Daniel Code), Canada, 2020, 13 min, in English) US premiere!
• 13 Square Meters (Kamil Bembnista & Ayham Dalal, Germany, 2021, 15 min, in Arabic, English & German with English subtitles) US premiere! Co-presented with Goethe Pop Up Seattle
• Moving Barcelona (Jevan Chowdhury, United Kingdom, 2021, 6 min, in Catalan with English subtitles)
• Abolishing Prisons One Garden at a Time (US, 8 min, in English)
• One Last Ride (Anastasia Babenko, US, 2021, 8 min, nonverbal)
• We Do It for Awá (Natalia Kobylinska, Brazil, 2021, 18 min)

“The change is for good, you say. Show me. Show me the change.” – Moving Barcelona

Mar. 19 at 7:30pm
Robolove
(Maria Arlamovsky, Austria, 2019, 75 min, in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, English, Japanese & German with English subtitles)

Robolove prepares viewers and the world for an inevitable future – where realistic robots will exist commonplace alongside humans, performing and participating in day-to-day activities as trophy lovers, educational representatives, and android counterparts.

Mar. 20 at 4:30pm
touristic intents
(Mat Rappaport, US, Germany & Netherlands, 2021, 73 min, in English & German with English subtitles)
Northwest premiere! Co-presented with Goethe Pop Up Seattle

Developed as a vacation resort that would build sympathy between working-class vacationers and the Nazi party, then later used as a military training site, and the outpost of a large group of East German Conscientious Objectors, Prora is now slated for a modern redevelopment. What role should its complex history play in what happens to the site next?

Mar. 20 at 7:30pm
Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands (screens with We Do It for Awá)
(Chris J. Gauthier, US, 2021, 63 min, in English & Spanish with English subtitles)

Artist-architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello use 3D-printing technology to build adobe structures on Rael’s ancestral homelands in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Energy-efficient, eco-friendly, and affordable, this new sustainable construction method builds on positive aspects of the relationship between the region’s Indigenous and Hispanic cultures that has endured throughout their shared history.