NEWS
Arte e architettura al cinema
Living - Corriere Della Sera | April 10, 2024
Premiato con L’AFA (Architecture Film Award) per la categoria Lungometraggi all’ultimo Milano Design Film Festival, Skin of Glass narra la storia della più grande “favela verticale” di San Paolo: l’edificio di 25 piani progettato da Roger Zmekhol nel 1968. Il documentario segue Denise Zmekhol, regista figlia dell’architetto, in un viaggio alla scoperta del lascito artistico di suo padre, affrontando al contempo il tema della disparità: grave minaccia per la città e per l’eredità di Zmekhol.
Filmmaker Spotlight — Denise Zmekhol, Director of SKIN OF GLASS
Salem Film Fest | March 2024
In SKIN OF GLASS, filmmaker Denise Zmekhol (CHILDREN OF THE AMAZON, SFF 2009) explores her late father's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, Brazil affectionately known as the Pele de Vidro (“Skin of Glass”), which in the decades following its construction has fallen into disrepair and become occupied by hundreds of unhoused families. The film delicately interweaves the personal and political in a poetic and cinematic meditation on displacement, inequality, and loss.
SFF Programmer Emeritus, Jeff Schmidt caught up with Zmekhol ahead of the film's New England Premiere at Salem Film Fest.
Milano Design Film Festival, dentro le forme che attraversano il mondo
RollingStone.it | March 7, 2024
Da ieri al 10 marzo, in tre location in tutta la città, il festival che mette l'architettura, la moda e il design sotto l'occhio della settima arte. A inaugurare 'Green Over Grey. Emilio Ambasz' di Francesca Molteni e Mattia Colombo
Milano Design Film Festival
Fuorisalone | February 27, 2024
The program of the 2024 edition of the film festival dedicated to the many facets of the world of design, opens with an extraordinary guest. The Milan Design Film Festival returns from 6 to 10 March 2024. The event, now in its 11th edition, talks about design and architecture through cinema.
BARQ Festival - Skin of glass
Fundación Arquia | February 8, 2024
El 18 de octubre de 2023 tuvo logar la proyección de la película SKIN OF GLASS, documental ganador del BARQ Festival y coloquio posterior con el director de cine y arquitecto Fernando Colomo y el arquitecto Lluís Alexandre.
The Architecture & Design Film Festival builds a bridge between Chicago and the world
Chicago Reader | January 23, 2024
The Architecture & Design Film Festival returns to Chicago next weekend in its second consecutive year at the Chicago Architecture Center. The five-day festival features 20 films, ten short films, and a series of panels and speakers pulled from the worlds of architecture and design within Chicago and internationally. The festival runs in Chicago after visiting New York, Toronto, and Vancouver during the last three months.
Best Films of 2023
BeyondChron | January 8, 2024
This writer’s choice for 2023’s best documentary is Denise Zmekhol’s “Skin Of Glass.” The film’s odd title happens to be the popular nickname for the magnificent gleaming Edificio Wilton Paes de Almeida, thanks to its innovative use of glass as a core part of its architecture. How this symbol of Brazil’s future wound up as a memorial to a nation’s lost dreams got poignantly recounted by Zmekhol.
Kumu cultural documentary series begins
Err.ee | January 4, 2024
The new season of the Kumu Art Museum's cultural documentary series opens next Wednesday. All documentaries shown in the series are free to attend and feature English subtitles. The winter season ends on February 28 with the screening of "Skin of Glass" by Denise Zmekhol.
À la recherche du Dad perdu
New York Review of Architecture | December 3, 2023
Nobody has daddy issues like the children of famous men. Their fathers, like anyone else’s, only exist as a mystery. They may be pursued or ignored, but they will never be fully deciphered. Such fullness—Alex Colston showed in a piece titled “Father” published in Parapraxis—is itself a delusion. For the children of stars, their fathers’ unknowability is only further proved by the world’s delusions of familiarity and confident assertions of proximity
Watching 'Skin of Glass'
world-architects.com | December 1, 2023
Can a work of architecture reveal something about its creator? Or does a building only tell stories about its occupants? In Skin of Glass, filmmaker Denise Zmekhol attempts to learn more about her father, who died when she was just fourteen, by visiting his masterpiece, the 24-story “Pele de Vidro” (Skin of Glass) in São Paulo, an office building turned police station turned housing for squatters.
Reflecting wonder and loss: Denise Zmekhol’s Skin of Glass
Vilcek Foundation | October 19, 2023
In Skin of Glass, filmmaker Denise Zmekhol uses her father’s masterwork—the Pele de Vidro (skin of glass) building in downtown São Paulo—as a lens. Through the history of this monumental piece of modernist architecture, she explores her relationship with her late father—architect Roger Zmekhol—and to the political and economic history of Brazil since the building’s creation in 1961.
'Skin of Glass' Wins at BARQ
world-architects.com | October 2, 2023
Skin of Glass, a film by Denise Zmekhol that follows her journey to a modernist skyscraper in São Paulo that was designed by her later father and subsequently occupied by hundreds of homeless families, won Best Documentary Feature Film at the BARQ Festival.
Architecture + The City Festival, San Francisco
Eventbrite | September 28, 2020
Film Screening/Discussion: Skin of Glass
Join the Architecture + The City Festival for this preview of our work-in-progress film, SKIN OF GLASS. Follow the journey of filmmaker Denise Zmekhol who unearths an incredible narrative about her father's legacy as an architect.
TEDWomen 2019
Skin of Glass | December 5, 2019
In early December I was able to share the SKIN OF GLASS story with women from around the world at the TEDWomen BOLD + BRILLIANT conference in Palm Springs. I was so moved by the people who approached me to say how the story had touched them.
Filming in Brazil
Skin of Glass | December 1, 2019
In October and November we had our final shoot in Brazil. The trip had been timed to coincide with the architecture biennale in São Paulo, where architects Pablo Georgieff and Philippe Rizzotti were invited to pay tribute to the SKIN OF GLASS building with a live drawing project. A decade earlier, they had plans to turn it into a cultural lab, but when the world financial crisis hit Brazil, the funding was withdrawn.
Pop-Up Magazine Tour
Skin of Glass | June 13, 2019
I was invited to join Pop-Up Magazine’s spring tour this May and after sold-out premiere events in San Francisco and Oakland, I traveled to Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and DC. Pop-Up is a beautiful “live magazine” evening that features writers, photographers, filmmakers, radio producers and illustrators performing true stories in mixed media with live music.
It was an exciting creative challenge to translate a film project into a live event and I’m thankful to producers Tina Antolini and John Woo for their collaboration and to the whole Pop-Up team for an unforgettable experience. So many people spoke to me after the events to say how moved they were by the story.
@abstractsunday
Skin of Glass | June 4, 2019
So wonderful that @abstractsunday (Christopher Niemann) made his drawing with the building my father designed in São Paulo (the one on the right). Ed Conde Andrea Matarazzo, Av Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil. #rogerzmekhol
Tell me a story: Two tales of parents and their children
The San Francisco Chronicle | May 14, 2019
The first performance of Pop-Up Magazine’s spring 2019 issue show was at the Sydney Goldstein Theater on Friday, May 10. This, the third such show that I’d seen, made the best use of a startling array of stories and what seemed to be the most naturally integrated elements: music (by Minna Choi’s Magik*Magik Orchestra), photos and graphics that moved each story along.
In an evening of high points, it’s hard to pick the highest, but I won’t forget Denise Zmekhol’s “Skin of Glass,” a fragment of a documentary she’s working on about a Sao Paulo skyscraper that was her architect father’s masterpiece. The piece was both a love letter to her father and a horror story about urban poverty and economic disaster. I knew little about Brazil, less about Sao Paulo. But listening to this unfold, I was a child at bedtime, magically transported to a time and place that seemed at once foreign and familiar.
15 Bay Area Filmmakers to Watch
Better | February 19, 2019
Denise Zmekhol is a Brazilian-American journalist and an award-winning producer and director of documentary films that span the globe. Now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zmekhol has directed and produced commercials, feature documentaries, and transmedia projects for nonprofit organizations. Her 2008 film, Children of the Amazon, follows Zmekhol as she returns to the Amazon rainforest for the first time in 15 years to discover alarming environmental degradation and widespread poverty. She was later a co-producer and co-director for the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Digital Journey. She is now currently working on Skin of Glass — a film that explores how a Sao Paulo high-rise built by her celebrated architect father became the city’s largest slum.