Leeds International Architecture Film Festival 2026
About this Event
The inaugural Leeds International Architecture Film Festival brings filmmakers, architects, artists and researchers together to examine how moving images can generate new ways of thinking about architecture, environments and spatial experience.
Organised by the Leeds School of Architecture, the festival is led by Sarah Mills, Festival Chair and Head of Leeds School of Architecture, and Hyun Jun Park, Artistic Director and Course Director of Postgraduate Architecture.
The 2026 theme, Environmental Cinematic Imagination & Spatial Ecologies, responds to the urgent need to reconsider relationships between human and non-human environments, climate change, urban transformation, technology and cultural identity. Across three days, audiences will encounter featured screenings, curated platform sessions, presentations, conversations and an international symposium.
The programme opens with Ben Rivers’s complete Urthworks trilogy, which imagines planetary life at three stages following environmental collapse. Friday begins with Oliver Bray’s Dean’s Welcome, followed by Malve Lippmann’s introduction to Cinema of Commoning and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, and Renee Tobe’s presentation exploring Plato’s Republic through The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2.
The platform programme continues with Urbanity from the Ocean & Archipelagic Queerness, presented by Doreen Bernath, K.B. Izac Tsai and Gaetano Drago; moving-image and spatial-sound works by Henrietta Williams and Merijn Royaards; three paired screenings exploring place, memory and environmental change from the Northern Film School; and Towards Speculative Architecture, a selection of films by CLEAR + PARK, presented by Nic Clear and Hyun Jun Park.
Friday concludes with a fifteenth-anniversary retrospective celebrating Factory Fifteen, the BAFTA- and Emmy Award-winning film and experience-design studio co-founded by Kibwe Tavares and Paul Nicholls. The retrospective traces Factory Fifteen’s evolution from experimental architectural filmmaking to internationally recognised work across cinema, television, animation and immersive environments.
Saturday’s symposium opens with Sarah Mills’s keynote, Post-Anthropocene Cinema. Presentations by Lewis Paul and Alex Crowton, Doreen Bernath and K.B. Izac Tsai, Nina Bačun, and Mark Jarzombek will explore changing places, climatic imaginaries, cinematic spatial agency and environmental systems. The symposium concludes with Nic Clear’s keynote, Speculative Spatial Practice: Affect, Technology and Immersion. Selected papers will be considered for development in a special issue of Visionary Architecture Studies.
Rooted in architecture and film, LIAFF reflects Leeds School of Architecture’s ambition to expand urgent discussions about environmental crisis, spatial justice and possible futures beyond academic and professional contexts. By bringing these questions to wider audiences through cinema, the festival invites new perspectives on how moving images can document changing environments, challenge established spatial and political structures, and help imagine more sustainable, inclusive and resilient futures.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
