Nadja-Christina Schneider
Uday Berry’s nearly eleven-minute animated short film Bharat Minar. The Tower of a Forgotten India (2019) won the Best Fiction Short category at the 2021 Architectural Film Festival in London. The film festival “showcases the cross-pollination of architecture and filmmaking, exploring the evolving scope of each discipline”. Berry is a trained architect and graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) in 2019, where he was part of a project group (PG24) of architectural storytellers, led by Penelope Haralambidou and Michael Tite, which uses “film, animation, VR/AR and physical modelling techniques to explore architecture’s relationship with time” (Haralambidou & Tite 2023: 474).
Still from the film „Bharat Minar – The Tower of a Forgotten India“ (2019)
In his film, Uday Berry uses the exciting possibilities of architectural storytelling in his chosen format of an animated fictional short film to reflect on these complex questions and link them to different conceptions of historical time. The narrative construction and fascinating artistic realisation show the potential of visual architectural storytelling as an emerging form that will hopefully continue to thrive in the coming years and gain much more interest.