Objectified – Special screening in Barcelona

OBJECTIFIED, the new documentary by Gary Hustwit will have its official and only screening in Spain, next Thursday 4th of June in Barcelona. I wrote about this film in an earlier post, and I’m really looking forward to seeing it.
From the press release:

OBJECTIFIED is the new feature-length documentary by acclaimed HELVETICA director, Gary Hustwit. The film is about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. Smart Design is featured in the film, along with many other top designers and firms such as IDEO, Dieter Rams and Jonathan Ive from Apple. If you are a designer or you have an interest in design, this movie is a must see. Furthermore, this will be a great occasion for the Barcelona design community to get together.

The film has been getting critic’s praise and audience’s applause as it has traveled the world in the last couple of months. You can get a little sneak peek by watching the trailer for the film here.

Don’t miss out on your only chance to attend the Spanish screening of this documentary.  You can buy tickets at the door on the day of the screening but limited seats are going fast you can buy them in advance here.

The screening will take place June 4th at Cines Alexandra, Rambla Catalunya 90 at 8pm. After the movie enjoy a talk with the film director, Gary Hustwit, meet Smart Design’s VP of Industrial Design and have a beer compliments of Moritz. There will be also an after-party later that night, to be announced at the screening.

Objectified – for the love of everyday stuff?

In 2007,  Gary Hustwit directed Helvetica, a small budget, feature-length documentary about the 50-year old typeface. A niche film with an undeniably nerdy topic, Helvetica soon became a global phenomenon. One of the film’s greatest achievements was the way in which it managed to convey both Helvetica’s extraordinary designer status and its truly impressive universal success as possibly the most ubiquitous and generic typeface in common use.

Now Hustwit is at work on stuff. Moving from graphics to objects, his next project, due to premiere in Spring of 2009, is aptly called Objectified. Here’s how the Objectified website describes the project:

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

And here’s the trailer:

Objectified looks set to become another runaway success with the design crowd, but the trailer really makes me wonder whether it will manage to provide us with any interesting views on our everyday relationship with things – with generic things. The beauty of Helvetica was that through the passionate and obsessive following of one font, the film took us deep into what most of us experience daily as no-design-land, the land of cinema tickets, road signs, TV news – just life, no designer tag. Objectified seems more concerned with designers and their creative process, a hardly innovative approach to the world of objects that yields little real insight into the average human relationship with manufactured goods, but lots of talk about ‘good design’ and ‘user needs’. But I might be mistaken. I really hope I am. I guess I just didn’t like the trailer. That’s funny, because I thought I did.