The build­ing

In eastern Ukraine, in Kharkiv, lies Derzhprom, the state-owned house. Built between 1925 and 1928 in the style of constructivism, it was intended to embody the idea of communism. Although it is one of the largest realized constructivist buildings and a poster child for the 1920s avant-garde movement, it seems almost forgotten. The film Budinok (The House) moves between the classic, observational documentary and the experimental cinema. With very little dialogue, it is rather a poem of moving images. The use of mixed materials - 16 mm, Hi8, HD, 35mm archive material from the 20's and video archive invites you to reflect on how past and present are interconnected and how movement and time are related to the static of architecture. Derzhprom acts as a kind of time machine that travels through time as an absolutely immovable object. The space becomes here the time. Using text panels in the movie forces the connection to the silent movie. Danish Sound artist Felia Gram-Hanssen has composed a piece for the film in the silence of concrete music, consisting only of recorded natural sounds - an idea that goes back to Soviet artists of the 1920s. The sounds follow the rhythm of the building, the inner rhythm of the forms, an idea of Cubist art. The Constructivists asked what is the relationship between life and art, politics and aesthetics. In the film Budinok (The Building) we look at the fragments of a time (like the rag- picker of history) in which a new society seemed possible, fascinated by the choreography of the people moving through the corridors, floors and doors of this giant-time machine, convinced that the History is ultimately about the people who inhabit it.