Architecton

A stone-built magic circle and a spiraling quarry are scaled onto a circle drawn on paper – a sign of humankind’s planning and desire to build, even when building something new means destroying something first. Stone sculptures, piled on top of each other with piety, fall into the arms of the builders, while somewhere farther away in the quarry, explosions create a hypnotic landslide of stone, the noise of which is simultaneously beautiful and horrendous.

In Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary, untouched nature and the human-made are set both side by side as well as opposite each other in relation with time periods of varying lengths: a person’s lifespan, a few hours, 4000 years. What can be built in these time frames, and what destroyed? In Lebanon’s Baalbek, ancient Hellenistic and Roman temples have been allowed to slowly erode with the passage of time, whereas recently built modern housing was destroyed in the blink of an eye by Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.

This documentary, akin to Koyaanisqatsi, tends to show rather than explain or lecture. At the end, architect Michele de Lucchi presents a simple question: why do we destroy more than we build, and why do we build things that are ugly, when we could build something beautiful?

Anna Jolma (translated by Herman Tikkanen)

The HIFF screenings are the only opportunity in Finland to experience the film in its original 48 frames per second format, accompanied by immersive Dolby Atmos audio.