By Thomas Escritt
BERLIN (Reuters) – Our concrete urban landscape is at the heart of “Architecton”, Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s exquisite but contradictory documentary that examines how humans build and destroy their world.
The film sets black-and-white drone footage of quarries, temples and cities destroyed by earthquakes or missile strikes to sumptuous brass music from composer Evgueni Galperine, interspersed with scenes of Italian architect Michele De Lucchi erecting a stone circle in his garden.
“Sugar, cement, the two drugs of our century,” Kossakovsky told reporters at the Berlin Film Festival, where the film premieres on Monday, contrasting cheap Turkish housing levelled by earthquakes with the endurance of the 2,000-year-old temple Roman temple at Baalbek. “We have to stop this catastrophe.”
De Lucchi, who designed Tbilisi’s swirling Bridge of Peace as well as office equipment for Olivetti, laments that after completing his stone circle he will go back to working on a concrete skyscraper in Milan.
“I hate concrete because it’s aridity,” De Lucchi says. “Nothing will grow up in a concrete building.”
The film, one of 20 running for the festival’s top Golden Bear prize, is flawed: for example Ukraine’s Black Sea city of Mariupol is a ruin not because its houses were badly built but because they were struck by Russian missiles.
And although the film is critical of poor concrete designs, it doesn’t address the greater social evil of homelessness.
It’s a failing that Kossakovsky, wearing a blue-and-yellow lapel pin expressing solidarity with Ukraine, acknowledges.
“If I put everything in my film, it will be four hours minimum,” he said. “And people don’t like to watch four hours, right? So it’s a contradiction.”
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Ros Russell)
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