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SXSW 2021

Review: Mau

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- This take on the great Canadian designer Bruce Mau is an audience-friendly, thought-provoking documentary that will enjoy a lot of festival and streaming play

Review: Mau

Having its world premiere in the Documentary Spotlight section of the SXSW film festival, Mau by director, writer and producer brothers Benji and Jono Bergmann is a biopic of the Canadian designer Bruce Mau. While formally quite a standard documentary about a great personality, the nature of its subject makes it thought-provoking and even inspiring, something that Mau himself certainly appreciates.

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For this giant of design, who looks like a cross between Orson Welles and Santa Claus, but without any of the cynicism of the former or the tired legacy of the latter, inspiration and optimism are key. We can also add drive, ambition and perseverance, as this is a man who grew up in the wilderness in the far North of Canada, with a violent alcoholic miner father. "If you want something to happen here, you have to make it happen," says Mau near the end of the film as he visits his old house near Sudbury, Ontario, for the first time in 25 years.

As the film unfolds, we learn of Mau's meteoric rise: together with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, he basically redefined book design with their seminal volume "S, M, X, XL," published in 1995 when he was still in his twenties. The duo turned the usual method "first text, then design" upside down and took it as one singular task, where the text gets the treatment of an object, and the design is part of the content.

This all-encompassing approach is why Mau is so important. He was invited to redesign the visual identity of MoMA, the whole city of Mecca and the whole country of Guatemala, and to help bail Coca Cola out of its image of a terrible polluter. "It’s not about the world of design, it’s about the design of the world and our capacity to shape the world," as he puts it. This is where his huge exhibitions, Massive Change and Massive Action, hail from.

In between scenes shot with Mau on location in Beijing, Toronto and Guatemala City, and sharply edited snippets of interviews with friends, collaborators and experts, as well as his wife (and collaborator) Bisi Williams, the Bergmann brothers interview Mau in a sort of a white void, reminiscent of the snow-covered Canadian expanses of his childhood. They also include images of Mau walking around the void, playing with a silky spring, or surrounded with animated word bubbles listing his principles. 

Reading "Design the Time of Your Life," "Design the Invisible", or "Compete with Beauty" and "Break Through the Noise," those ideas sound superficial and empty, like motivational Facebook posts. And even with the context, the viewer can find themselves frowning at Mau's guiding principle of "Fact-based Optimism." But it really depends on which facts you pick: just as true as the fact that people living today have more access to education, information and health services than ever in history, is the reality that inequality remains rampant, and that the wealth gap just keeps growing as we keep destroying our planet.

This is why we need ambitious, visionary people like Mau. Even though his Mecca project was never realised (in short, because he's not a Muslim), architects from this part of the world were inspired by him and developed some of his ideas. Even though the rebranding of Guatemala was blocked by right-wing politicians, many young people took his cue and are, in effect, doing it every day. And even though Coca Cola is still a huge polluter, Mau did manage to change at least some of its culture and save the landfills from tens of millions of plastic bottles.

Mau is an accomplished, very audience-friendly biopic that is sure to get a lot of festival and streaming play. It was co-produced by Babka Film Bakery and Thought Engine. Autlook Filmsales is handling the film’s international rights.

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