Architecture of the 21st and 22nd MFDF Ji.hlava

The architectural form of the International Documentary Film Festival in Jihlava was developed and completely delivered by the author duo Josef Čančík (ECHTarchitektura) and Vít Šimek (H3T architekti) for a full ten years. Each year deserved a different original solution for the festival’s exteriors and interiors, always in response to the thematic accents of that particular year. Archiweb has followed and documented their form since the beginning of our work. The coming autumn, a year since our last jubilee tenth edition, reminded us that we still owe Archiweb at least a fleeting record (and actually also of the penultimate year). It would be a great shame to leave gaps in the chronicles, so let’s use this repayment of our debt to reflect back on the entire decade of our ephemeral architecture for Jihlava. From the very beginning (2009), we aimed for the festival not only to fulfill the users' needs in terms of temporary adjustments to the festival venues but also to enter public space with its architectural form and provide an escape for festival visitors from the demanding documentary marathon and for disinterested residents of Jihlava from local mundanity. The preparation of festival architecture gradually became a main signal for the residents that festival time was coming again and the city would be flooded with thousands of special beings speaking the most diverse languages, including the language of film. We gained particular favor with local children’s street gangs, who used our constructions completely unreservedly. Individual interventions were sometimes modest, other times megalomaniacal, sometimes silent objects, and at other times interactive entertainment attractions. Sometimes demanding construction structures, other times very conceptual rather social happenings. What connected all the years was the modest budget, which, despite the festival’s growth and its needs, remained practically unchanged and necessarily led to the search for a material basis based on a tripod: “cheap, sponsored, borrowed.” When we started with the festival, similar architectural “purposeless” happenings were not common in our country and far from recognized as a serious professional discipline. Therefore, it was a certain satisfaction for the inclusion of the pairs of the 18th and 19th editions in the Yearbook of Czech Architecture 2014/15, which represents a kind of symbolic official recognition of the genre. Today, temporary architectural happenings or directly festivals are organized regularly or sporadically. In last year’s edition, due to the budget limits, the festival decided to focus on a single location in front of the main festival cinema, where we completely newly constituted a kind of festival square supported by a large pavilion with, let’s say, a food zone.

This year, the architectural form of the festival expects new fresh blood. We believe that it will bring completely new, fresh, groundbreaking ideas, not varying our previous work. We wish that for the festival. All previous editions can be viewed here on Archiweb.