Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground), in collaboration with legendary indie band Yo La Tengo, takes the stage to create a “live documentary” that explores 20th-century futurist, architect, engineer and inventor Buckminster Fuller’s utopian vision of radical social change through urban redesign. Fuller, inventor of the Geodesic Dome, foresaw solutions to environmental challenges through “doing more with less” so that everyone would have enough. At each screening/performance, Green narrates the film in person and cues images while Yo La Tengo performs their original score. Wildly creative and experimental in form, The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller draws inspiration equally from old travelogues, the Japanese Benshi tradition, and TED Talks.

Buckminster Fuller was a grandiose and generous thinker, teeming with ideas. He once put together a lecture series called “Everything I Know”—it was 42 hours long. No notes. He was an early proponent of conservation and environmental stewardship as social justice; Fuller was interested in “doing more with less,” so that everybody could have enough. He redesigned human structures from cars and bathrooms all the way up to entire cities, inspiring figures as diverse as the industrialist Henry Kaiser, composer John Cage, and Stewart Brand. The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller explores this vision by looking at many of his concepts and projects, ranging from his signature invention, the Geodesic dome, to some of his more conceptual plans, including a proposal to build a huge dome over Midtown Manhattan to cut down on snow removal costs. Fuller’s projects were a collision between rational thinking and utopian idealism, made rich and complicated by his cultural connections and tireless optimism. “A singular experience, and a collective one, with the potential for human connection.”-New York Times