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.
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