Miami Design District and Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival Announce Collaboration on Fashion in Film Program for 2019 Festival

Curated by Marketa Uhlirova, Fashion in Film Festival, University of the Arts London

Miami, FL — Miami Design District (MDD) and Miami Dade College (MDC) announce a new partnership to present the acclaimed Fashion in Film Festival, curated by Marketa Uhlirova, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, in the Miami Design District as part of the upcoming 36th edition of Miami Film Festival, March 1 – 10, 2019.

“Cinema at its best takes us to places of wonder, and for our next edition Miami Film Festival will take cinema to a new place of wonder: the Miami Design District, one of Miami’s coolest neighborhoods,” said Miami Film Festival executive director Jaie Laplante. “We are thrilled to be expanding the 36th edition of the Festival into this oasis for culture, art, food, fashion, and film.”

“Every year Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival puts on an extraordinary and surprising program. This year, the Miami Design District is honored to co-present and host the Fashion in Film Festival through this collaboration and partnership with the Miami Film Festival and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. We are grateful to Cathy Leff for helping bring Fashion in Film to the District and this new and exciting partnership with the Miami Film Festival,” said Craig Robins, President & CEO of Dacra, the real estate development company behind the Miami Design District. “The District serves as a center for high fashion, luxury and design.  It also is a vibrant cultural hub where creative and enriching programming comes to life that serves our community. I couldn’t think of a better place for Fashion in Film to take place. Get your tickets early.”

This special Miami edition of the London festival takes place during the final weekend of Miami Film Festival, March 8-10th.The program will consist of a specially curated program comprising screenings, performance, panel discussions, and chats that explore the intersection between fashion and cinema. The program will be presented at Nite Owl Theater and in Paradise Plaza, a popular convening place within the District.

“For Miami, I am interested in staging a speculative dialogue between cinema, fashion and art – as three areas of creative practice that are normally seen as separate – to consider different kinds of intersections and continuities among them. Looking at the entire history of cinema it is evident that fashion and dress have been among major concerns for filmmakers and artists working in the medium of moving image. There has been great interest in the rituals of dressing, undressing, and posing; in self-fashioning and physical transformation; in the decadently pleasurable qualities of decorative surfaces, in the poetry and uncanny tension between the organic and the artificial body – and that of disembodied clothes that assume a life of their own,” commented curator Marketa Uhlirova, co-founder and director of the annual London festival.

While the full line-up of Fashion in Film will be unveiled in late January, Uhlirova, Laplante, and Leff divulged details of the program’s opening event taking place on March 8th. In collaboration with London composer, music producer, and filmmaker Rollo Smallcombe, Uhlirova will present The Inferno Unseen, their own assemblage of rushes from the kinetically experimental visuals of Henri-George Clouzot’s The Inferno, starring Romy Schneider, one of the most tantalizing uncompleted projects in film history. Smallcombe will accompany the presentation with live music. A Festival party on the rooftop deck of Paradise Plaza will complete the evening.

Miami Design District and Miami Film Festival’s announcement was unveiled at a reception in one of the future venues for the program, Nite Owl Theater, and was accompanied by a screening of James Crump’s new fashion documentary Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex, Fashion & Disco, courtesy of Film Movement.

Miami Film Festival is the only major film festival produced and presented worldwide by a college or university. MDC is also home to the renowned Miami Fashion Institute which has also used film as a teaching tool with its popular film series.

Tickets for Miami Film Festival, including the Fashion in Film program, will go on sale to Miami Film Society members exclusively on Friday, February 1st and to the general public on Friday, February 8th. Tickets: 1-844-565-6433 (MIFF) or miamifilmfestival.com .

For membership opportunities or more information, visit miamifilmfestival.com or call 305-237-FILM (3456). Miami Film Festival is the only major film festival event housed within a college or university.

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About Miami Design District

The Miami Design District is a neighborhood dedicated to innovative fashion, design, architecture and dining experiences. The Miami Design District is owned by Miami Design District Associates, a partnership between Dacra, founded and owned by visionary entrepreneur Craig Robins, and L Catterton Real Estate, a global real estate development and investment fund, specializing in creating luxury shopping destinations. Together Dacra and L Catterton Real Estate have actively transformed the once-overlooked area of Miami into a vibrant destination for residents and visitors by presenting the best shopping, cultural and culinary experiences within an architecturally significant context. The vision for a rejuvenated Design District — responsive to its historic, urban and tropical context – was codified in an urban master plan developed by the award-winning master planners Duany Plater-Zyberk, with the additional participation of architects including Walter Chatham, Hariri and Hariri, Juan Lezcano, Terence Riley, and Alison Spear. The Miami Design District embodies a singular dedication to the unity of design, fashion, art and architecture, and a commitment to encourage a neighborhood comprised of creative experiences.

About Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival                                                      

Celebrating cinema in two annual events, Miami 2018 GEMS Festival October 11-14, 2018 and its 36th annual edition March 1 – 10, 2019, Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival is considered the preeminent film festival for showcasing Ibero-American cinema in the U.S., and a major launch pad for all international and documentary cinema. The annual Festival more than 60,000 audience members and more than 400 filmmakers, producers, talent and industry professionals. It is the only major festival housed within a college or university. In the last five years, the Festival has screened films from more than 60 countries, including 300 World, International, North American, U.S. and East Coast Premieres. Miami Film Festival’s special focus on Ibero-American cinema has made the Festival a natural gateway for the discovery of new talent from this diverse territory. The Festival also offers unparalleled educational opportunities to film students and the community at large. Major sponsors of the 2018-19 Festival season include American Airlines, Telemundo and Miami-Dade County. For more information, visit miamifilmfestival.com or call 305-237-FILM (3456).

About Marketa Uhlirova

Marketa Uhlirova is an art historian with an interest in the display, representation, and mediation of fashion and dress, especially in the moving image. She is a co-founder and director of the Fashion in Film Festival, and a Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her film programs have been hosted by leading arts venues including Tate Modern, Barbican, Palazzo Grassi, Danish Film Institute and Museum of the Moving Image, New York. She has recently co-produced and co-edited The Inferno Unseen (2017), a new cut of the unfinished 1964 film by Henri-Georges Clouzot, which is still touring internationally. Marketa is also the editor of Fashion in Film’s publications, including If Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence (2008) and the award-winning Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (2013), and a regular speaker at cinema and arts venues including the BFI Southbank, ICA, and Museum of the Moving Image, New York. She has contributed writing to Fashion Theory, Art Monthly, Aperture, AnOther, Notebook and others.

 About the Fashion in Film Festival

Fashion in Film is an exhibitions, research, and education project based at Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London. The first festival was launched in London in May 2006 as the first film festival of its kind and has since become a leading international project exploring the common ground shared by fashion and film. At the heart of its mission is archival and scholarly research, combined with accessible and wide-reaching debate. The program draws on a rich history of the moving image and brings together documentary and fashion films, commercials, newsreels, early cinema and experimental film as well as classic and forgotten gems in European, American and World cinemas. Through a focus on fashion and film costume, the festival mixes the worlds of cinephilia, popular culture, design, art and the underground.

Interdisciplinary by design, Fashion in Film promotes collaborations and dialogue between curators, historians, archivists, fashion designers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers, aiming to explore the connections between moving image and clothing, and more broadly, questions of design in film.

Miami Film Festival Media Relations Contact:

Craig Evans, Allied Global Marketing | 954-200-8021 | cevans@alliedglobalmarketing.com