Trillion

synopsis

A female figure in a white dress walks across a stretch of living earth that seems at times to float on the waves, resembling a forgotten wreck, a dead whale or a fallen monumental sculpture. Fierce winds rage through this shimmering, almost lunar landscape of elegant, rounded forms; at times rain pours down, at others sunlight beats upon it. The central question is: who is she, where is she going, and what is she carrying in that large white sack on her back? Director Viktor Kossakovsky’s black-and-white minimalism moves between an audiovisual poem, a record of a particular artistic performance and a kinetic meditation connecting humanity with the cycle of life and death in the oceans.

“I’m not using many words in my movies, I’m trying to use cinema language. I’m trying to use pictures. A picture alone talks most of the time. Our eyes are unbelievable computers. We are able to look at someone and read that other person. This is why I don’t understand why cinema, specifically documentary cinema, doesn’t use this factor. We understand the world not through voiceovers and talking heads. It’s not through words. We understand the world around us through looking.” –– Viktor Kossakovsky, (The Hollywood Reporter)

biography

Viktor Kossakovsky (1961) is a director originally from St Petersburg. The filmmaker behind feature-length, often entirely wordless works such as Aquarela (2018), Gunda (2020) and Architecton (2024) ventures far beyond the boundaries of the conventional documentary, particularly in the way he films his subjects and shapes their stories. He describes his latest film, Trillion, as the second instalment of a planned “trilogy of empathy” devoted to things humanity pays too little attention to.

film details

director:	Viktor Kossakovsky
producer:	Anita Rehoff Larsen, Tone Grøttjord-Glenne, Joslyn Barnes
script:	Viktor Kossakovsky
photography:	Egil Håskjold Larsen
editing:	Ainara Vera, Viktor Kossakovsky
music:	Nastasia Khrushcheva
sound:	Alexander Dudarev