The Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) is returning this fall with a new lineup of films, panel conversations, and events, and making two Canadian stops in Toronto and Vancouver.
Presented by Eventscape, this year’s program features 11 international films that, when viewed together, showcase design projects’ complete, long-term lifecycles as they subtly influence how we interact with our environment and indirectly shape our lives.
The 2026/27 season kicks off in New York on October 12, 2026, and currently has six festivals on the calendar, with one or two more cities possibly joining the lineup. A special night is planned to launch the season at the Museum of Modern Art. From New York, the tour heads north to Canada.
ADFF: Toronto will take place from November 4 to 7, followed by Vancouver from November 10 to 15.
The opening night film, MUNDO FRÁGIL by architectural filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, depicts a week-long journey with Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, as he travels across his country. Filmed two years before he became the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, it captures an intimate, unguarded portrait of the architect.
The range of Bêka and Lemoine’s work spans from films, books, photography, exhibitions, and the teaching of cinema. Their artistic and human approach to storytelling about architecture, design, and the people who inhabit spaces continues to expand the scope of architectural filmmaking.
“You can draw a line through almost every film in this year’s festival: what do we do with what’s already been built,” said Kyle Bergman, founder and festival director of the ADFF. “Movements like the Bauhaus and Googie are being handed back to the people who lived them, and to the people that history left out of the credits. And more than one of these films is watching a housing experiment play out in real time, with no guarantee it works. This festival is about surfacing the questions facing architects and designers right now, and these films give us the chance to explore, discuss, and consider them — an active engagement with the past, present, and future that offers unique insight into how the field is evolving.”
After the New Year, the festival returns to India with ADFF: STIR Mumbai, followed by a new stop in Detroit. From there, the tour continues to ADFF: Chicago.
The full roster and schedule will be released on September 22, 2026.
Tickets will be available for sale on October 7, 2026.
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