Architecton (Victor Kossakovsky 2024 Germany, France, USA, French Polynesia 94 min)

Through light and sound, we are given a cinematic experience that is completely out of the ordinary.

Few directors utilize the medium of cinematic imagery like Victor Kossakovsky, who previously directed Aquarela (2018) and Gunda (2020), both of which earned numerous international awards across Russia, Norway, and Sweden.

His new epic, Architecton, premiered in the main competition at the Berlin Film Festival and offers an artistic exploration of architecture spanning over a thousand years.

From the two-thousand-year-old ruins of the temple city Baalbek in Lebanon to the bombed modern buildings in Ukraine—where people have lived and, in some places, still do—and all the way down to the ancient geological layers where humanity laid its first stones and settlements, the film traverses time and space.

Architecton is a stunning and captivating film on an epic scale.

Although largely wordless, the director takes time to visit Italian architect Michele de Lucchi (b. 1951), who, alongside craftsmen, creates symbolic stone circles in a garden—a reminder that cultures rise and fall, and our own era is no less vulnerable to human or natural calamities and collapse.

Architecton inspires awe and reflection and is a film that, more than any other, deserves to be experienced in the cinema.

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