Architection Trailer: Victor Kossakovsky Explores a World of Concrete

After premiering back at the 2024 Berlinale, we’ve been wondering when Victor Kossakovsky’s Architection would finally be released by A24, particularly after the disappointing news they were shuttering their entire documentary division. Thankfully, we’ll get to see the latest work from the Gunda and Aquarela filmmaker soon: they’ve set an August 1st release on more than 100 screens nationwide.

Ahead of this opening, they’ve unveiled a trailer for the journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete, and its ancestor, stone. The film stars legendary architect and designer Michele De Lucchi alongside several million tons of rocks. 

“We decided we wanted to make images similar to [those of the Italian archaeologist, architect and artist Giovanni Battista] Piranesi, who made drawings of ruins about 300 years ago, which were so precise and graphic, almost like a photographer, very black and white, that no one believed them. I decided to find those sites, but we also looked for camera filters to achieve the same high contrast images,” Kossakovsky told BFI. “Second, we varied the film speeds to show that time is relative. The life of a mosquito is just one day, but it can probably write [its equivalent of] War and Peace in its time. And our life is very short compared to the life of a rock. So we decided to show that rocks could be alive – they can dance, for instance. Our idea was the last minute in the life of a rock. We see mountains and a blast, which looks like the creation of the universe. Then we see the rocks approaching the 1,400C fire like Dante’s gate of Hell.”

See the trailer below.