Kumu Documentary: Infinity According to Florian
Dir Oleksiy Radõynski
Ukraine and USA 2022, 70 min
In Ukrainian and Russian, with English subtitles
Introduction by Chief Curator of the TAB24, architect Anhelina L. Starkova
The film is presented in collaboration with the Tallinn Architecture Biennale and the Estonian Centre for Architecture.
The Tallinn Architecture Biennial 2024, “Resources for a Future”, in cooperation with Kumu Documentary, presents the film Infinity According to Florian. The documentary is about the life of a building and the death of an architect, the art of thoughtful individualism and the spontaneity of public urban interests, the confluence of two epochs at the edge of illusive futuristic dogmas with disenchanting commercial urbanism, and finally human life lost in this vortex.
The film delves into the story of the Ukrainian architect Florian Yuriev and his fight to give a second life to the outstanding avant-garde building known as “the flying saucer”, which he conceived and built for the Institute of Information in Kyiv, when his own life was about to end.
The film-maker Oleksiy Radynski challenged the documentary form, experimenting with a synaesthetic fusion of a biographical documentary about the talented yet forgotten Ukrainian architect with an ambitious attempt to use a film to collect legislative alibis and as an influential tool for action during the ongoing fight for the potential of the modernist heritage, while forming the idea of the future architecture of Kyiv.
The apparent contextual reciprocity of the urban arenas of Tallinn and Kyiv, with their Soviet edifices, creates special interest for Estonian audiences and the upcoming Tallinn Architecture Biennale, “Resources for a Future”. In this way, the film reveals the motion picture industry as a resource not only for communicative visual art but also for a new dimension of civic activity in our relentless fight for architectural pride.
Oleksiy Radynski is a film-maker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Docudays IFF, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin) and e-flux (New York), among other places, and have received a number of festival awards.
Florian Yuriev is a Ukrainian architect. He was born in Siberia in 1929. Yuriev graduated from the Irkutsk College of Arts, Kiev Art Institute and the Moscow Printing Institute (in art history) in 1974. From 1956-1976 he worked as the chief architect of the Kievproject institute. His architectural projects include the Nivki 3 project district in Kiev, the two-storey building of the Khreshchatyk metro station in Kiev, and the Technical and Economic Information Education of Ukraine (commonly known as the flying saucer).
