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Having championed the cause of animals in farmyard doc Gunda, Victor Kossakovsky is making a fresh appeal to the world through new work Architecton: stop using concrete.
The visually arresting documentary, world premiering in Competition at the Berlinale, explores how unsustainable modern building practices relying on concrete are destroying the planet and suggests there are lessons to be learned from ancient constructions.
Without explanation or commentary, the work juxtaposes mesmerizing images of mountains being dug out for raw materials; vast landfill sites, bombed-out, collapsed apartment blocks in Ukraine and quake-hit towns in Turkey, with the majestic remains of the 2,000-year-old Roman temple complex of Baalbeck in Lebanon, which still puzzles archaeologists to this day on how it was built.
“Buildings made from concrete are lasting 40, 50 years. In the UK, you destroyed 50,000 buildings last year, imagine what is happening in the rest of Europe,” says Russian-documentarian Kossakovsky, in a timely comment as the UK grapples with how to deal with crumbling concrete in hundreds of public buildings including schools and hospitals.
“In order to produce cement, we destroy mountains. Even a small cement factory needs 26 tons of coal an hour, and it’s working non-stop 24/7,” he continues. “Last year, we produced enough cement to build a one-metre thick, 1,000-high wall around the equator. The amount of the cement we’re producing is a catastrophe. People are talking about sustainable architecture but it’s not true, for real sustainable architecture is what they were doing in antiquity.”
The documentary, which was financed by A24 and is being sold internationally by The Match Factory, is the third part of the director’s Empathy trilogy about the need to respect nature, after Vivan la Antipodas! (2011) and Aquarela (2018). Gunda was part of his Apology trilogy, the second film of which is due out later this year.
Berlin-based Kossakovsky explains how he had been planning to make a documentary focused purely on modern architecture around the world when the pandemic hit.
Confined to Berlin, he turned his attention to the city’s Tempelhof area, the former location of Tempelhof Airport in the centre of Berlin, which has not been developed since its closure in 2008 and is now the largest inner city open space in the world.
“This place is unique, and Berliners were fighting to keep it empty… Imagine a huge airport in the middle of the city, in its centre, and there is nothing there, emptiness… It’s like the lungs of the city,” says Kossakovsky.
“There were a few battles. Of course, developers wanted to build skyscrapers, shopping malls and stuff like this but the citizens said, “No, we want to keep it empty.”
While supporting this goal, Kossakovsky felt that one day the developers would get their way and decided to ask leading architects around the world what they would propose doing with the space, to create something beneficial to Berliners that would last into the future.
“Let’s jump 50 years ahead and imagine what could be the right thing to build, if it’s not left empty because it’s valuable land,” says the director.
Italian architect Michele De Lucchi, who appears in the film, agreed with Berliners that the site should be left alone.
“He said, ‘Let’s not touch it. Not only do we not touch it, let’s make it into a symbol of something we don’t touch and shouldn’t touch and never enter, to remind ourselves that we are only part of nature… this is how the film started, and I dedicate it to Berliners,” says the director.
In the backdrop, Kossakovsky, who has lived outside of his native Russia for more than a decade, initially leaving in protest at the Chechen War, reveals that he wanted to stop making the film when his country invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“When the war started, I called my producers saying, ‘I cannot make the film. How can I a make a film about modern architecture, when my country is making a catastrophe’,” he recounts. “But they said, “No, No, you’re committed”. So, I had to make it and I realized that apart from the war that Russia is making against Ukraine, there is a bigger war we’re all making against nature.”
Kossakovsky still slips in unsaid condemnation of Russia’s war on Ukraine in the opening scenes showing drone-shot images of Ukrainian apartments ripped in half, with bedrooms and living rooms containing personal belongings on display.
“When you see these ruins, you know from which direction the missiles came, you know who’s guilty,” says the director, letting the images speak for themselves.
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