This Spring bank holiday weekend sees the cinema release of two films on the iconic Irish modernist designer Eileen Gray

THOROUGHLY MODERN This Spring bank holiday weekend sees the cinema release of two films on the iconic Irish modernist designer and architect, Eileen Gray

The Price of Desire and its companion documentary, Gray Matters, are set to reinstate Eileen Gray’s legacy as one of the most important innovators of contemporary design and architecture. Released in the year that marks 40 years since her death, the films open in selected UK and Irish cinemas from May 27.

The Price of Desire, which stars Orla Brady as Eileen Gray, is the controversial story of how Gray’s influential contribution to 20th century architecture and design was almost wiped from history by the ‘Father of Modernism’, Le Corbusier (Vincent Perez). Set substantially on the Cote d’Azur in and around her most abiding work, villa e1027, The Price of Desire unfolds how her relationship with philanderer Jean Badovici, who made Le Corbusier famous, further fuelled the rift between the two architects, and consigned Gray’s legacy to a century of neglect and long-overdue recognition. Alanis Morissette returns to her first love of acting to play Gray’s on/off lover, chanteuse Marisa Damia. Julian Lennon provides the film’s stunning stills photography.

The Price of Desire writer-director, Mary McGuckian says “I hope this film about how a female architectural icon came to lose her right to be recognised as the author of her work can serve to highlight the impact of insidious chauvinism prevailing in certain professions to this day, architecture and film-making among them.”

Marco Orsini’s documentary feature Gray Matters, which includes interviews with the world’s experts in the many fields the work of Eileen Gray spans, explores the long, fascinating life and complicated career of an architect and designer whose uncompromising vision defined and defied the practice of modernism in decoration, design and architecture. Orsini says, “To be blunt, I don’t know of any other documentary film being made to today or in the future on Eileen Gray which could or would hope to realise the vast scope of access assembled by this production to date.”

In London, The Price of Desire opens at the Barbican, a multi-arts venue that hosts regular architectural tours and design and architecture screening programmes. Gray Matters screenings are being held in Bertha DocHouse at Curzon Bloomsbury, a cinema venue whose redesign was influenced by post war modernism to showcase films in a minimalist setting. The cinema’s furniture was created according to original designs by Eileen Gray, and as supplied by Aram, the world-wide licence holders for most of Eileen Gray’s furniture pieces.

For details of participating cinemas in the UK and Ireland, go here.

Members of the public can also create and attend their own cinema screenings in selected UK cities for The Price of Desire and Gray Matters using the Ourscreen digital-social platform.

Photo credit: Orla Brady as Eileen Gray in The Price of Desire. Copyright Julian Lennon 2014. All Rights Reserved.