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If we pay enough attention to the ordinary, we see the extraordinary. The shipping container is an accidental icon of our modern age: the eight-foot-by-forty-foot corrugated steel box that brings the world to our doorstep. The design studio LOT-EK is a visionary practice at the intersection of art and architecture that specializes in upcycling. The shipping container is the thing that has captured their imagination for over a quarter-century: they have remade containers into homes, schools, galleries, libraries, and more. With hundreds of millions of obsolete and unused containers around the world, this is a new and necessary architecture of the future, that repairs and regenerates the unnatural environment that we have inherited from the past. We Start With the Things We Find is a feature-length documentary of this vision, and of the soulful lifelong partnership of the people, designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, behind it.

Presented as part of the 2024 DC Environmental Film Festival:

DCEFF has been the premier Festival showcase of environmental films since 1993. Each March in Washington, DC, we bring the world’s largest green film festival to massive in-person audiences. Since 2020, we have focused on extending our reach beyond DC to the entire world with our virtual Festivals and ever-growing Watch Now catalog. In 2023, we were extremely excited to return to venues across the DC Metro for in-person screenings and events — in addition to continuing to offer year-round virtual programming for our audiences around the world.