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Open call: 2023 short film competition presented by Copenhagen Architecture Festival

Film competition deadline: March 1

The Copenhagen Architecture Festival's short film competition, "Film Mosaic: Leave No One Behind," focuses on inclusive design and architecture. Submitting deadline is March 1, 2023.

The Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) has chosen to study the role architecture may play in eliminating inequality in all its manifestations and meeting the UN’s goal to “Leave No One Behind” (LNOB).

CAFx published an open call for short films highlighting inclusive design solutions discovered in the built, grown, and planned environment in Spring 2022. The film competition’s purpose is to demonstrate how the LNOB agenda may be followed on a local scale, through inclusive urban practices and modest yet brilliant innovations that make spaces—cities, neighborhoods, buildings, streets—more welcoming, accessible, healthier, and inclusive for all.

Elaborating on the growing interest for film as research and communication tool in architectural practice and urbanism, CAFx has chosen a film competition as the privileged site for documenting and disseminating examples of inclusive design from around the world, and has appointed an international jury of architecture and film experts to assess the films, consisting of Architecture Film Directors Békà & Lemoine, Architect Anupama Kundoo, Founder and Editor in Chief of ArchDaily David Basulto, President of Congress for the UIA2023CPH in Copenhagen Natalie Mossin, and Founder and Director of Copenhagen Architecture Festival, Josephine Michau. 

The winners will be invited to the premiere and award ceremony of the next Copenhagen Architecture Festival, which will be held in June 2023 in conjunction with the World Capital of Architecture and the UIA World Congress (1st prize: 2500 EUR; 2nd prize: 1500 EUR; 3rd prize: 1000 EUR).

All short films entered in the competition, whether professional or amateur, are continuously featured on the Film Mosaic platform, an open-access online source designed to inspire the work of students, decision-makers, researchers, and practitioners, as well as to transfer knowledge across borders through the effective medium of film.

The film collection reveals how spatial discrimination reflects society’s structural inequities and shows itself in a variety of geographical locations, urban and rural, public and private, North and South. Simultaneously, by taking part in the worldwide Film Mosaic, you may not only raise awareness of the immense potential of architecture and design to support more equal futures, but also share your views about how local solutions can create value in a bigger global context.

Read the guidelines and submit your short film here.

Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) is the largest yearly architecture festival in Scandinavia. CAFx has been exploring, discussing, and communicating architectural and urban questions since its inception in 2014, through exhibitions, debate events, publications, excursions, workshops, an extensive film program, an online Journal, and other means, depicting visions, conflicts, and historical transformations in the built environment that blur the lines between architecture, aesthetics, and politics. CAFx hosts a yearly Summer School and an industrial PhD student on the issue of film and architecture. Collaborations across disciplines, techniques, and experiences underpin our approach.