“We Put Ourselves in the Center of the Universe Without Thinking of the Other Creatures and Species Around Us”: Victor Kossakovsky on Architecton

A film starring rocks should not be this thrilling. But in the meditative hands of master documentarian Victor Kossakovsky (2018’s Aquarela, 2020’s Oscar-shortlisted Gunda), Architecton, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, is an epic and hypnotic stone-centered quest to answer the existential question, “How do we inhabit the world of tomorrow?” And the original precursor to today’s concrete — the most-used substance in the world after water — seems to provide a surprisingly sensible answer. With Italian architect Michele De Lucchi as our bedrock, we’re swept into a visually striking, globetrotting excursion that takes us from the bombed-out buildings of Ukraine, to the earthquake-shattered cities of Turkey, and all the way back to Lebanon’s temple ruins in Baalbek, which have been around since AD 60, manmade and natural disasters be damned. Which ultimately returns us to the renowned architect, whose works have been acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and perhaps his greatest legacy-defining design of all: a landscape project based around a circle that no human will ever be allowed to enter. A green reminder that we are not the center of a universe that puts people and pebbles on equal footing. Whether we’ll remain on firm ground is up to us. Just prior to the film’s August 1st theatrical premiere, Filmmaker reached out to the Russian director, whose political views and refusal to work within a corrupt film industry caused him to leave his homeland over a decade ago. (And whose citizenship nevertheless prevented him from actually shooting in Ukraine.)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.