A love triangle of jealousy in the Parisian art scene of the 1930s is brought to life in a stylish docufiction about iconic artist and architect Eileen Gray, who built her modernist dream house on the Riviera, only to be upstaged by Le Corbusier.
Eileen Gray had a truly eminent sense of design. The Irish artist and architect created some of the most iconic furniture of the 20th century, so when she focussed her unique artistic vision on developing a house for herself on the Riviera in 1929, the result was a modernist triumph. A house and a work of art in one, overlooking the sun-sparkled infinity of the Mediterranean. The house is named E.1027, a cryptic contraction of the names of Gray and her lover, Romanian architect Jean Badovici. But when the Swiss-French star architect Le Corbusier learns of the house, he becomes obsessed – perhaps because Gray breathes light, air and soul into her building, which is not just a machine to live in. ‘E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea’ reconstructs the dramatic story of Gray and the house that Le Corbusier amazingly managed to convince the world he had built himself. A stunningly beautiful and cinematic docufiction where the inspiration from Gray is present in lines, colours and shapes – but where they serve the narrative of a brilliant female artist who spent a long life in the shadow of her male colleagues.
In this powerful documentary, Mama Yang, an 84-year-old woman living in New York, finds herself in correspondence with 45 high security prison inmates she views as her own children. Most are Chinese American immigrants, and see in Mama Yang a mother figure they never knew before they stepped through prison walls.
For Mama Yang though, the story is about more than Christian charity. She had already lived a full life in Taiwan when her husband died at age sixty and her son lost their house in a financial blunder. She moved to the US to start anew and lives with a Taiwanese American granddaughter that remains distant. In a film marked by family separations, Mama Yang writes letters – whether to the incarcerated or to her own granddaughter – to heal lifetimes of wounds.
