Empathy for Concrete Things

Based on their experiences living and working amongst Soviet-era concrete, panel-block apartments, the filmmaker, together with five visual artists, examine past and present attitudes towards their former homes. Combining touching, personal stories with experimental research on the history of twentieth-century art and architecture, the film creates both a compelling narrative, and a contemporary aesthetic of panel-block mass housing using original watercolors, put into motion using digital animation and stop-motion techniques. As global and personal histories interweave, the film explores notions of moral and political responsibility as evinced in physical space. Empathy for Concrete Things thus considers how modern architecture has become the site of both utopian fantasies, and major calamities that shaped the history of the twentieth century. As former postsocialist countries have been thrust, or hang on the edge of new humanitarian and political crises, the film expresses its own rallying cry against destruction, all from the vantage point of concrete, panel-block apartments.

  • Gregory Gan
    Director
  • Gregory Gan
    Writer
  • SFB 1171: "Affective Societies" at Freie Universität Berlin
    Producer
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Postdoctoral Fellowships)
    Producer
  • Anonymous Participant 1
    Key Cast
  • Anonymous Participant 2
    Key Cast
  • Anonymous Participant 3
    Key Cast
  • Anonymous Participant 4
    Key Cast
  • Anonymous Participant 5
    Key Cast
  • Gregory Gan
    Motion Graphics and Animation
  • Dina Velikovskaya
    Motion Graphics and Animation
  • Anne Isensee
    Motion Graphics and Animation
  • Florian Grolig
    Motion Graphics and Animation
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Feature
  • Genres:
    Animation, Documentary, Ethnographic film, Experimental
  • Runtime:
    1 hour
  • Completion Date:
    June 30, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    8,400 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Germany
  • Language:
    English, Russian
  • Shooting Format:
    Animation; motion graphics
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Gregory Gan

Gregory Gan is a visual anthropologist with research interests in the anthropology of art and architecture, transculturalism, and postsocialism. His training in filmmaking resulted in two acclaimed ethnographic films, Turning Back the Waves (2010, 96 minutes), where he explored the stories of seven women as they lived through the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union, and The Theory of Happiness (2014, 82 minutes), in which the filmmaker became a member in a radical Ukrainian sect trying to discover happiness through mathematical formulas. An interactive, traveling installation Gregory completed as part of his doctoral research, Still Life with a Suitcase, (2019), was based on a series of interviews with post-Soviet Russian-speaking migrants living in Paris, Berlin, and New York. The film Empathy for Concrete Things (2023) was completed as part of Gregory’s postdoctoral fellowship, generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and hosted at the Collaborative Research Centre “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, credited as the film’s producers.

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