bauhaus forever.
A cinematic essay
by Nico Weber
Germany / Netherlands, 2026
96 min 13 sec
bauhaus forever. — Press Texts
LoglineFilmed over five years at Berlin’s displaced Bauhaus-Archiv, bauhaus forever. turns an unfinished museum into the body of a larger question: what happens when a radical idea survives the world that produced it?Short SynopsisInside an unfinished building, the world is seen from a place that does not yet exist. Concrete ends in open air. Water gathers below ground. Machines move, stop, wait. Beyond the fences, Berlin continues as if the ground beneath it were certain.
The Bauhaus-Archiv has left its house. Its collection and its people have moved into temporary rooms. The future museum is still only concrete, scaffolding, dust and time. For five years, the camera returns. But the film does not proceed in a straight line. It turns.Across seven chapters, spaces, bodies, archives, machines, voices, music and wind recur in shifting constellations. The Bauhaus was born from the ruins of one world. A century later, the ground is shifting again. An experiment becomes an institution. What was meant to remain in motion is preserved, framed, attacked — yet refuses to stand still.With each turn, another relation becomes visible. What appeared historical begins to look present. What appeared stable begins to move. Elsewhere, a creature moved only by the wind begins to walk.
bauhaus forever. does not force its fragments into a final account. It keeps them in motion.The construction site is not its subject. It is its condition. The film is complete. Its questions are not.Long SynopsisAt first, there is a building.
The Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin is closed. Its collection has left the house. The people who care for it work elsewhere, in temporary rooms, while behind fences another building slowly rises from the ground. For five years, Nico Weber returns to this place.The visible subject is the Bauhaus: a school that existed for only fourteen years and became an idea large enough to survive its own end. A name, a style, an archive, a promise. Something preserved so carefully that one might forget it was once meant to disturb the order of things.
But the construction site does not remain a subject for long.
It enters the film.Schedules fail. Work stops and starts again. Rooms are emptied. Plans shift. The pandemic interrupts the production; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changes the world in which the film continues. These events are not announced as themes. They leave pressure marks. They alter the intervals between images, the distance between voices, the time a building needs and the time a film is allowed to take.
The film itself becomes a construction site.It is built in seven chapters, but they do not form a straight line. History does not arrive in the correct order. It comes through a letter, a hand movement, a piece of music, an empty room, a sentence heard too late. Images meet across decades without explaining why they belong together. Some connections are visible at once. Others remain under the surface.The Bauhaus emerged after the First World War, when Europe had become almost unrecognisable to itself. It carried the belief that life could be made otherwise: how people lived, learned, worked and built together. It was attacked by the National Socialists and forced to close. Its people scattered; many were driven into exile.A century later, the far right has found the Bauhaus again.
They call it a wrong turn of modernity.
A dead idea would not need to be attacked again.
Modernity is not a period safely stored in an archive. It is a condition under pressure. Its promises have not disappeared, but neither have the forces that opposed them: the desire for openness and the fear of it; experiment and obedience; the difficult invention of a common future and the fantasy that the past was once pure.The film does not turn these tensions into an argument. It watches how they inhabit buildings, institutions, bodies and language.
The building and the construction site are the protagonists. The people pass through them. They work, remember, search, measure, doubt. They carry history without owning it. What they say matters. What escapes their words matters too.
bauhaus forever. is a film about perception.What do we see because we have been told where to look? What disappears when history is arranged too neatly? What becomes audible when explanation withdraws?
The fragment is not a broken piece of a complete story.
The fragment is the story.
It allows different times to remain different and still touch. It resists the comfort of a single line. It asks the audience not merely to follow, but to take part in the construction of meaning.On a beach, a creature moved by the wind begins to walk. It advances through resistance. It remains upright by yielding. Perhaps this is not Bauhaus. Perhaps it is what survives of its impulse.The Bauhaus is the visible subject.
The construction site is the film’s form.
Modernity under pressure is its political condition.
Perception is its method.
The fragment is its narrative.
The film is complete.
Its questions are not.— Nico Weber, 2026
Director Bio
Nico Weber (she/her) is a filmmaker, essayist, and visual artist based in Berlin.
She doesn’t film topics — she films from ways of thinking.
Raised between modernist buildings and post-war silences, her work draws from architecture, political philosophy, and journalism under pressure.Her films don’t explain, they stay.
With images usually overlooked.
With rhythms that resist. Working across cinema, installation, and expanded formats, she treats film as a compositional space — made of light, time, and uncertainty.
She leads the independent platform NOW Collective.
Recent works include bauhaus forever. (2026, 96 min), ZZYZX. Journey to the End of the Alphabet, 106 min, (completed / release in preparation), and INSIDE PRORA (2020, 100 min).
Selected Filmography and Public Presentations
Feature-Length & Cinematic Worksbauhaus forever. (2026, 96 min) — Essay film, D/NL
A construction site becomes a thinking space: a film about what remains when
modernity no longer holds — and what still insists on a future.
ZZYZX. Journey to the End of the Alphabet (2023, 106 min) — Essay film,
D/AT/CH/IT/USA with poet Oswald Egger — a journey to the edges of language, where
meaning dissolves and begins again.
Inside Prora (2020, 100 min) — Documentary/Essay, D/IT/USA
A building from the past becomes a question for the present: how ideology survives in
space.Between Cinema, Television & EssayBauhausfrauen. The Forgotten Pioneers of a Movement (2018/19, ZDF/3sat)
Reclaiming hidden histories — and rewriting a canon that still shapes our present.
Der Pilz am Ende der Welt (2018, 3sat Kulturzeit)
On fragile ecologies and unexpected forms of survival in a collapsing world.
Tijuana Revisited (2017, 15 min, D/MEX/USA)
A border as a shifting reality — porous, unstable, deeply human.
Big in Japan. A Draughtsman in the Land of Signs (2015, ORF/3sat)
On drawing as a way of seeing — and misunderstanding as a creative force.
Im Rausch der Schönheit (2015, 3sat)
A reflection on beauty in an age of excess and acceleration.Earlier Works & International PortraitsStuds Terkel – Listening to America (USA)
On one of the great chroniclers of everyday life — and the power of listening.
Stanley Kubrick – Images Against Time
A film on control, vision and the limits of cinematic perfection.Counterattack – Economy in the Crosshairs of Art (2011, ARTE/ZDF/SRF)
Artists explaining the systems that shape our lives — and how they can be challenged.Artistic Works, Installations & Live FormatsDitzner’s Carte Blanche (2023)
Live audiovisual composition, Enjoy Jazz Festival.
Five Meditations on Death (2019)
5-channel installation, B3 Biennale Frankfurt.
Photograms (ongoing)
Direct exposures without camera — images made through light, time and material
contact.
Situated between film still, trace and abstraction, these works extend Weber’s
cinematic thinking into a tactile, analogue image practice.
Kubik Kollektiv – audiovisual collaborations (ongoing)
Between music, film and spatial experience.Artistic Research & Discoursebauhaus forever. still breathing — an ongoing research and public-programme practice around bauhaus forever., 2023–ongoingScreenings, talks, site-based formats and institutional conversations developed in relation to the film, with presentations and contexts including ARK Rex Architecture Film Festival Helsinki, supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Designmuseum Denmark Copenhagen, Architexture Bologna and Kumu Art Museum Tallinn.Current Research TrajectoriesProjects in development include essayistic and hybrid film works on architecture and crime, non-linear life narratives, healing architecture, global capitalism and the longing for analogue forms.
Film Stills
Title card — bauhaus forever. appears as if emerging from within the image.
© NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch.
Still 01
Bauhaus Dessau, night projection — the historical icon reappearing as an image in the
present. © NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026
Archival materials courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin
Still 02
Construction site, aerial view — the ongoing rebuilding as the film’s central condition.
© NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch
Ventilation pipe, sound of breathing — infrastructure as a sensory presence,
suggesting a living body. © NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch
Still 04
Bauhaus Archive construction site — the closed institution observed in transition. © NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch
Still 05
Archival performance image — gestures from the Bauhaus past resurfacing in fragments.
© NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026.
Archival materials courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin
Still 06
Bauhaus logo, archival object — modernist identity preserved as material trace.
© NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026.
Archival materials courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin
Still 07
Forest, aerial view — a counter-image to architecture and construction. © NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch
Still 08
Strandbeest, kinetic sculpture — movement, wind, and utopian engineering by the sea.
© NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch,
Strandbeests: courtesy of Theo Jansen / The Hagues (NL)
Still 09
Grimm Library, Berlin — order held in suspension.
© NOW Collective / Nico Weber, 2026. Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch
FESTIVALS, SCREENINGS & ARTISTIC RESEARCHA film changes each time it enters a new room. bauhaus forever. began its public life while it was still being made — as a work in progress, a lecture and an open conversation — before entering the international festival circuit in 2026.THE FILM BEFORE THE FILM25 NOVEMBER 2023
ARK REX ARCHITECTURE FILM FESTIVAL · HELSINKI
Work in ProgressArk Rex was one of the first festivals to recognise and support the long-term project. An approximately 46-minute rough cut, created specifically for the festival under the title Work in Progress, was shown and discussed with the audience. The presentation opened a dialogue about the film’s evolving form, the Bauhaus-Archiv and architecture as a process rather than a finished object.16 NOVEMBER 2025
ARK REX ARCHITECTURE FILM FESTIVAL · HELSINKI
Artistic Research Presentation: bauhaus forever. Still Breathing.With support from the Saastamoinen Foundation, the project returned to Ark Rex for a lecture and artistic research presentation. An advanced but not yet completed version of the film was shown and discussed as part of the research process — a conversation about montage, repetition, failure, architecture and the moment at which a film finds its form.Ark Rex did more than programme bauhaus forever.: it accompanied the development of the film over several years. We remain deeply grateful to Tarja Nurmi and the festival team for their early trust, continuity and space for experiment.FESTIVAL JOURNEY14 MARCH 2026
CPH:DOX · COPENHAGEN
World Premiere · Special PremieresWorld premiere of the completed 96-minute film (96'13''). Five screenings in total across Copenhagen, including a screening and conversation at Designmuseum Danmark.cphdox.dk/film/bauhaus-forever/19 APRIL 2026
ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN FILM FESTIVAL WINNIPEG · CANADA
Canadian PremiereScreening at the Dave Barber Cinematheque as part of the Architecture + Design Film Festival Winnipeg.12 JUNE 2026
BIOGRAFILM FESTIVAL · BOLOGNA
Italian Premiere · Biografilm Art & MusicScreening at Cinema Lumière, Sala Scorsese, presented in collaboration with Goethe Zentrum.27 JULY 2026
ARCHITEXTURE · BOLOGNAOpen-air screening at Le Serre dei Giardini Margherita as part of the 11th edition of Architexture, the architecture film series presented by the Culture Commission of the Order of Architects of Bologna.22 AUGUST & 28 AUGUST 2026
ESPOO CINÉ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (21-30 August)
ESPOO, FINLAND
FINNISH PREMIEREFinnish premiere of bauhaus forever. at the 37th Espoo Ciné International Film Festival. Nico Weber will attend in person 28 August to introduce the film and join the audience for a Q&A after the screening.30 AUGUST 2026
OULU 2026 · ALVAR AALTO WEEK · FINLANDScreening and public conversation during Alvar Aalto Week in the European Capital of Culture 2026. Presented as an Ark Rex spin-off and initiated by Tarja Nurmi.9 SEPTEMBER 2026
KUMU DOCUMENTARY · KUMU ART MUSEUM · TALLINNScreening in the Kumu Documentary programme at the Kumu Art Museum.9 OCTOBER 2026
ARCHITECTURE FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM — AFFROfficial Selection. Screening at LantarenVenster during AFFR 2026.OCTOBER 2026
ADFF · NEW YORKU.S. premiere and the beginning of the film’s journey through the Architecture & Design Film Festival’s 2026/27 season.Further festival and screening dates will be announced.
Film information / Tech Specs
Title: bauhaus forever.
Director / Writer / Producer: Nico Weber
Production: NOW Collective
Countries of production: Germany / Netherlands
Year: 2026
Running time: 96 min 13 sec
Language: German OV with English subtitles
Format: DCP / ProRes available
Cinematography: Marc Nordbruch
Editing: Marc Nordbruch
Music Concept: Ralf Merten / Kubik Musik
Short Credits – Festival / Industry Version
Director / Writer
Nico WeberProducer
NOW Collective, Nico WeberCinematography
Marc Nordbruch
René Dame
Florian Lehmann
Holger Hahn
Nico WeberEditing
Marc NordbruchDramaturgical Consultant
Wolfgang StahlSound
Lorenz Brehm
Henry Leikauf-Dürheim
Buddy Neumann
Philipp SchumannSound Design & Re-Recording Mixer
Oliver EngelhardtOriginal Music
Ralf Merten
Kubik Kollektiv
Alex MatwijuckAdditional Music & Musicians
Erwin Ditzner
Lömsch Lehmann
Max Mahlert
Alex Matwijuck
Ralf Merten
Jan Hennig (aka Kabuki)
Chris RückerVoice
Romanus FuhrmannColor Grading
Sven HaasProduction Management / Coordination
Jules Gießler
Jörg Leine
Laura Olalde
Steven RodriguesLegal Counsel
Alexandra HölzerTranslations & Subtitles
Gülçin Koerpe
Production Company
NOW Collective© 2026 NOW CollectiveMade possible by Bauhaus-Archiv – Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin
Contact
Festival, Programming & Press ContactFor festival programming, curatorial inquiries, press requests, educational screenings and professional preview access concerning bauhaus forever., please contact: NOW Collective GmbH & Co. KG, Email: [email protected]Distribution, Licensing & Rights
Distribution, licensing, broadcasting and other rights-related inquiries concerning bauhaus forever. are handled by NOW Collective GmbH & Co. KG in coordination with Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin, where required under the existing project agreements. Please contact NOW Collective GmbH & Co. KG in the first instance: [email protected]Legal Notice / ImpressumInformation pursuant to Section 5 of the German Digital Services Act (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, DDG)
NOW Collective GmbH & Co. KG
c/o Nico Weber (she/her), Friedelstraße 40. 12047 Berlin
Germany, Email: [email protected]Registered office: Berlin / Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRA 56556 B
VAT ID: DE326871194 / Represented by: Nicola Weber / Nico WeberResponsible for editorial content pursuant to Section 18(2) of the German Interstate Media Treaty (Medienstaatsvertrag, MStV):
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