Sixth Year of Collaboration: Ennesimo Film Festival and Ceramiche Caesar explore new cultural languages
The 2025 edition of the Caesar Design Film Award focused on Design Exploration, investigating various aspects through a cinematic approach: from the use of raw materials to green architecture, from education to contemporary issues. As the concluding act of a journey that began in the classroom, students from the Industrial Product Design course at the University of Bologna were taken on a factory tour at Ceramiche Caesar’s production headquarters. They discovered how raw materials transform into finished products and learned about the production technologies companies can use today to optimize output. The design talk led by Ceramiche Caesar experts offered a practical meeting and discussion, providing students with an in-depth perspective on production processes. In the evening, the Cinema Teatro Astoria in Fiorano hosted the Ennesimo Film Festival’s selection dedicated to design and architecture—a curated collection of 6 films that explored architectural exploration from diverse perspectives.
The cinematic experience was preceded by a masterclass with Mario Cucinella. With a career spanning design, research, and education, Cucinella centers his work on the connection between architecture, nature, and sustainability. During the evening, the architect shared his vision on design, revealing how empathy is the key element in his architectural proposals. Plants are a fundamental source of inspiration in design, especially for their incredible adaptability. In this regard, the architect proves to be a pioneer, having always placed nature and resource conservation at the core of his personal research. During the masterclass, he demonstrated how empathy and observation of places have helped him conceive projects in harmony with the surrounding environment across the globe: from the Iride kindergarten in Guastalla to sustainable bio-architecture in Africa. His vast experience, recognized with prestigious awards like the Compasso d’Oro ADI for the Luigi Rovati Foundation Art Museum, and his constant commitment to education and research, make Cucinella a benchmark for anyone interested in an architecture that looks to the future with responsibility and awareness.
Caesar Design Film Award 2025 Winners
After architect Cucinella’s lecture, the short films were screened, and judgments were made by the in-person jury, the technical jury, and the “wannabe designers” jury. They declared the following winners:
Caesar Design Film Award 2025
- Les Matérialistes by Jonathan Lapalme
The jury provided the following motivation for the award: “A film that promotes a genuine path towards a future with low environmental impact, also reflected in its dedicated website. The ‘Les Materialistes’ project describes a working method aimed at recovering materials for a resource-conscious architecture. It’s an incentive to improve, to progress towards a future that is not so far off and must be built now. We really appreciated this positivity and believe it fully captured the theme of the Caesar Design Film Award.”
Special Mentions
The jury also wished to award a special mention to:
- Bangladesh Architecture in the Process by Samuel Bravo, which explores new solutions for the Bangladeshi population, aiming to build community by caring for the territory and adapting to the context with a flexible approach. Here, the designers are physically on site, in a difficult but humanly rich reality.
- Wannabe Designers Mention: Oleg & the Architecture School by Paul Thomas
- Audience Mention: Fernando Laposse by Sonia Singh of Dezeen Studio