6 p.m.: Meet at CRB, inside YBCA (701 Mission St)
6:30 p.m.: Guests move to YBCA Screening Room
8 p.m.: Return to CRB for post-screening questions
8:30 p.m.: Program concludes

RSVP now >>

Giorgio Angelini introduces and screens his documentary Owned, A Tale of Two Americas (2018), followed by a discussion with UC Berkeley Professor of Landscape Architecture Walter Hood.

The United States’ postwar housing policy created the world’s largest middle class. It also set America on two divergent paths—one of imagined wealth, propped up by speculation and endless booms and busts, and the other in systematically defunded, segregated communities, where “the American dream” feels hopelessly out of reach.

Owned is a fever dream vision into the dark history behind the US housing economy. Tracking its overtly racist beginnings and its unbridled commoditization, the film exposes a foundational story that few Americans understand as their own.

It was during the tumultuous time of the 2008 real estate collapse that the seeds for Giorgio Angelini’s documentary debut, Owned, began to take shape. Awarded a research grant to photograph the abandoned homes of Inland Empire, California, what Angelini ultimately encountered was an environment far more perverse and disturbing than he had initially anticipated: thousands of square miles, once thriving orange groves were burnt down to make way for a new commodity—air conditioned square footage. With the financial crisis, the charred orange groves sat alongside half-built McMansions. Sparked by this imagery, Owned tells a larger American story.

Film plays a central role in merging disciplines and conveying stories. Informed by creative fields from painting and architecture, to performance and drawing, filmmakers have applied diverse perspectives to inform their cinematic visions. Documentary filmmaking, particularly, captures moments of time, uniquely reflecting our lives and culture back to us, advancing critical areas of agency and discovery. The screening of Angelini’s film and post-screening talk will explore the relationship of architecture, and film, while naturally folding in topics of urban transformation, race, and economics.

Giorgio Angelini came to film from a multifaceted career in the creative arts. After touring with bands like The Rosebuds and Bishop Allen, Angelini enrolled in Rice University’s Masters of Architecture Program. Following graduate school, he worked with the architecture firm Schaum Shieh Architects where he designed a wide array of projects, from an exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale to the White Oak Music Hall in Houston, Texas, which received an AIA design award in 2017. Now focused on filmmaking, Angelini launched a production company called Section Perspective Films, the name a nod to his practice operating at the intersection of architecture and film. He served as executive producer for the feature film My Friend Dahmer and directed the documentary-short My Death is Pending…Because. Angelini is currently in production with animator Arthur Jones for a feature documentary about Pepe the Frog, memetics, and the rise of far-right politics in America.

Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is his tripartite practice, working across art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. He is also a professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

Hood designs and creates urban spaces and objects that are public sculpture. Believing everyone needs beauty in their life, he makes use of everyday objects to create new apertures through which to see the surrounding emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies of urban space. His ideas emerge from years of studying and practicing architecture, landscape architecture, and fine arts, and yet Hood tactfully eschews from differentiating between the three on any one project.

The Studio’s award winning work has been featured in publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood is also a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award.