The granite face of a quarry shatters into boulders, cascading in mesmerising slow motion; a man with a wheelbarrow potters around the Roman ruins at Baalbek in Lebanon; bulldozers and diggers pick over the shattered fragments of a bombed-out Ukrainian housing complex; an Italian architect commissions a stone circle for his garden, hovering fretfully as the landscapers toil in the snow to finish the design feature.
The latest film from Victor Kossakovsky, who documented the lives of farm animals in the sublime Gunda, Architecton is a gorgeously photographed poetic reverie on the subject of stone and concrete, permanence and profligate waste. It’s a gentler documentary, but calls to mind Behemoth, the extraordinary film about industrialisation in China by the artist and film-maker Zhao Liang. Both are works of striking visual poetry that ask difficult questions about humankind’s impact on the planet.
In UK and Irish cinemas
