'REM' to Premiere at 73rd Venice Film Festival

John Hill

18. August 2016

Photo: Tomas Koolhaas

Tomas Koolhaas's much-anticipated documentary on his father, 71-year-old OMA leader Rem Koolhaas, will premiere at the 73rd Venice Film Festival, which runs from 31 August to 10 September 2016.

The 36-year-old Koolhaas's 75-minute film will be part of the festival's special program, alongside documentaries from Italy and Venezuela. Per the REM website and accompanying Facebook page, the film "exposes the human experience of architecture. The resulting documentary is more revealing than the generic poster image, and more evocative than the intellectual reality of architectural renderings."

Ahead of its screening in Venice, REM has already been reviewed at The Guardian. Oliver Wainright, the paper's architecture critic, describes the globe-trotting film as "a feature-length commercial for a frequent flyer club," as well as "a one-on-one session with Koolhaas on the psychiatrist’s couch" and "a catalogue of Rem’s anthropological observations on subjects including construction workers, the countryside, collaboration and celebrity."

No details are yet available on screenings after the Venice premiere, so for those not attending the festival these trailers will have to suffice for now.

Official Trailer #2: