If you head straight for the world’s great museums, galleries, and performance halls when you travel abroad, you’re not alone. But then you probably realized that when you saw the hours-long lineup to get into the Louvre or had to book your specifically timed ticket to the Uffizi months in advance.

Vancouver International Film Festival director of programming Alan Franey wondered if it was part of a broader zeitgeist, and his question was answered when he saw a New York Times article in late July headlined “Masterworks vs. the Masses”, reporting that European museums were straining under the weight of their popularity. The Louvre was the busiest museum in the world last year, with an astounding 9.3 million visitors, while the British Museum and Vatican Museums were just two of the facilities that saw record-breaking attendance—this despite global economic uncertainty.

“We live in a digital world where so much is quantity over quality, and that has meant that cultural artifacts and being in a place offer a quality encounter that is more meaningful,” Franey posits. “If we look at the art market in general and museum figures, we see a desire to ground our experiences in the real.”

The phenomenon, as you might expect, is also playing out on film, specifically in a mini series of three suitably grand cinematic creations about “cultural cathedrals” at the fest this year. “It’s no surprise there’s a renewed interest among filmmakers and they know there’s an audience for it, that these films will be seen,” Franey tells the Straight.

Visitors, and wannabe visitors, to Vienna will want to catch Johannes Holzhausen’s The Great Museum (screening October 1 and 10), a vast, elegantly rendered portrait of the meticulous inner workings of the palatial Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, lavish home to priceless Rembrandts, Raphaels, and Brueghels as well as stunning armour, costumes, and ancient artifacts. The fly-on-the-wall film captures the huge amount of work it takes to maintain such an immense place and such valuable pieces, from the small army of floor polishers to the white-gloved restorers to the art historians analyzing paintings. Touching on the constant efforts to reach the public, the movie also sits in on marketing meetings, where administrators argue over advertisement designs, and on auctions, where staff battle ruthless private collectors for coveted objects.

The documentary also provides an insider’s view of the space itself, from its labyrinthine storage spaces and offices to its shelves upon shelves of ancient busts and broken pottery. Outside its huge windows sits the fairy-tale cityscape of Vienna. You start to imagine what it would be like to work in this strange, rarefied world.

Comments Franey: “It’s a lovely behind-the-scenes film that takes you into the most invisible parts of running an institution and seeing the craftspeople as they tend to the place. It creates this mosaic, privileged view.”

Elsewhere, American verité icon Frederick Wiseman, who’s depicted institutions from the Paris Opera Ballet to the University of California at Berkeley in recent years, turns his camera to Britain’s artistic jewel in National Gallery (September 25 and 28). He looks at the inner workings and collections of the Trafalgar Square landmark that’s home to more than 2,300 historic pieces.

“It’s more of an institutional analysis,” explains Franey. “He sits down at meetings of board members and marketing directors as they try and speak a common language. But it’s different than The Great Museum: to complement that, Wiseman spends a lot more time looking at the paintings.”

Contrasting those two masterworks is Cathedrals of Culture (September 30 and October 4), director Wim Wenders’s 3-D omnibus project celebrating the architecture of six institutions around the world with pieces by six auteurs, including Wenders himself, Robert Redford, Michael Madsen, Michael Glawogger, Margreth Olin, and Karim Aïnouz.

Ambitiously creative, with some of the buildings “addressing” us themselves, the movie ends up being a giant artwork itself. Amid the evocative tracking shots in Wenders’s look at the vast, zigzaggy Berliner Philharmonie concert hall, the “ghost” of cigar-chomping architect Hans Scharoun comes to life. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy provide the soundtrack for Glawogger’s trip around circular walkways and up spiralling staircases in St. Petersburg’s jam-packed National Library. And a surreal cast of dancer-performers appears across the icy white steps of Oslo’s Opera House in Olin’s piece.

“It really enlarges our understanding of what they [the buildings] mean, not just from a cultural perspective, but a social perspective and economic perspective, and what they mean in a modern world,” Franey comments. “It’s true: a lot of human institutions, we take so much for granted. Here, we’re seeing very different buildings and different cities, and seeing them through a separate set of eyes.”

Franey hopes the series will enrich the experiences of both real travellers and armchair ones. How do you compare a film about the National Gallery to going there? “They complement each other,” he explains. “The film might inspire you to go there, or if you have been there, it’s a revelation that deepens your experience.” Of course, the film won’t come with an hours-long lineup.