Nominations for the 2023 award cycle have closed. Nominations for the 2024 award cycle will open in June 2023.
Purpose
The SAH Award for Film and Video was established in 2013 to recognize annually the most distinguished work of film or video on the history of the built environment.
Criteria
The award is global in scope with no geographic or political boundaries limiting subject matter or production team. The topic of the film or video must be any aspect of the built environment including the history of buildings, interiors, monuments, landscapes, cultural landscapes, urbanism, designers, engineers, clients, preservation, conservation, citizen engagement, or other topics related to the history of the built environment.
Films and videos representing a wide range of methodologies will be considered including documentaries, critiques, theoretical works and documentary recreations of lost sites. Films and videos by independent directors and producers, including those with a K-12 educational focus, are also welcome.
Films or videos must have an initial release date within the past three years. Honorable Mentions may also be awarded.
Entries for consideration will be submitted, on a DVD or a link to an online viewing site such as Vimeo, to the award committee members and the SAH office by the director, producer, or producer’s distributor.
Nominees will also submit a 150–250-word narrative that addresses the goals of the film/video, the intended audience, where the work has been screened/aired/viewed, and what kind of response the work has received.
The most important criterion is the work’s contribution to the understanding of the built environment, defined either as deepening that understanding or as bringing that understanding to new audiences. A second criterion is a high standard of research and analysis, whether the production was for a scholarly audience, a general audience, or both. A third criterion is excellence in design and production.
The Award
The Award will consist of a certificate and citation that will be presented at the Awards Ceremony at the Society’s Annual International Conference. Following the presentation, the film will be shown at the conference. The Award will be announced in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the SAH Newsletter, and on the SAH website. The winning film or video will become part of the Society’s permanent archive, housed in the library at the Society’s headquarters, Charnley-Persky House, in Chicago. The recipient will be required to supply two copies of the award-winning film on DVD for the Society’s archive.
2022 Award Recipient
Not Just Roads - Official Trailer from Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou on Vimeo.
Nitin Bathla and and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Directors and Producers
Not Just Roads (2020)
Not Just Roads is a well-filmed, focused and nuanced take on the impact of highway building in contemporary India on the disenfranchised. The globalization of investor development is depicted from the perspective of both humans and non-humans. Using sound and fieldwork-based footage in a theoretically sophisticated approach, the film brings to fore the complexity of development in the so-called developing world that continues to follow a Western model despite the adverse impact on the local population. Connectivity at the cost of human displacement is a paradox that is seldom addressed. The film gives voice to that paradox.
Award Committee:
Vibhuti Sachev, Chair
Patrick D. Haughey
Ipek Türeli