Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary offers awesome drone-shot sequences of wrecked and ruined buildings, but could have been constructed more solidly

Victor Kossakovsky is the author of some ambitious and immersively sensory documentaries, including Aquarela from 2018, about the climate crisis, and Gunda from 2020, about the consciousness of animals. Now he has created this monolithic, almost wordless and vehement meditation on concrete and stone; the building materials which are so substantial and yet appear, in the many drone-shot sequences of wrecked and ruined buildings, to be also temporary and almost fragile – their durability revealing itself finally in the almost overwhelming problem of simply how to clear it all away, how to get rid of the smashed and useless rubble. The mysterious shots of stone being crushed or broken in quarries show a violence in the harvesting of stone being analogous to future destruction.

There are some powerful images here, of shattered buildings in Ukraine, ruined by war, and those in Turkey, destroyed by the 2023 earthquake; these are juxtaposed with the musings of Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, who is shown studying the ancient ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon and also creating for himself a stone circle in his garden, which he describes quaintly as a “magic circle”.