The trailer for Victor Kossakovsky’s stunning new documentary Architecton has racked up 160,000 views in a day – very impressive for a nonfiction film.
The feature, built of stone and concrete, examines the materials of architecture and the permanence or impermanence of buildings and the societies for which they were constructed. A24 will release Architecton on August 1 in over a hundred theaters. Watch the trailer above.
The Berlin Film Festival, where Architecton premiered in 2024, wrote of the film, “Centering on a landscape project by the Italian architect Michele De Lucchi, Kossakovsky uses the circle to reflect on the rise and fall of civilizations, capturing breathtaking imagery from the temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, dating back to AD 60, to the recent destruction of cities in Turkey following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in early 2023. Rocks and stone connect the disparate societies, from ghostly monoliths stuck in the earth to tragic heaps of concrete rubble waiting to be hauled off and repurposed anew.”
A24
Architecton has earned rave reviews from critics, including Deadline’s Damon Wise. Reviewing the film out of the Berlinale, he wrote, “Kossakovsky’s roving eye takes us around the world, in a travelogue that shows us the resilience of the old world versus the transience of the modern. It shows the poetics of ruin, but it is a cycle with diminishing returns; the debris of the Romans and Greeks still has a grandeur and majesty that is missing from the shabby detritus of the modern world, as we see in the aftermath of the earthquake that laid waste to Turkey in the summer of [2023].”
Wise added, “Kossakovsky’s fascinating, magnetic film essay does help us to reassess what we’ve lost over the centuries. And, best of all, it isn’t depressing… [I]t is a warning sounded in the good faith of being heard in the nick of time.”
Director Victor Kossakovsky
Ian Gavan/Getty Images
The Russian-born Kossakovsky – who has lived for many years outside of Russia – has earned dozens of awards around the world for his films, including Sreda (1997), Russia From My Window (2003), ¡Vivan las antípodas! (2011), and Aquarela (2018). His 2020 documentary Gunda, executive produced by Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix, examined the life of a pig raising a farrow of piglets who are then seized and sent to slaughter. Gunda earned a place on the Oscar shortlist of that year’s top documentary features.
See the trailer for Architecton above.
Content shared from deadline.com.