Architecton

Victor Kossakovsky

Filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky has won more than a hundred international awards. Kossakovsky was born in 1961 in St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad), where he began his career as an assistant photographer, director and editor at Leningrad Studio of Documentaries in 1978, and is a trained screenwriter and director from the film school HCSF in Moscow. Kossakovsky’s first full-length documentary as a director was Losev from 1989. In 1992, he received international recognition with The Belovs, which among a number of other awards won the VPRO Jaris Ivens Award and the Audience Award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA). His documentary ¡Vivan las antipodas! was selected as the second opening film at the Venice Film Festival in 2011. The film was nominated for the European Film Award for Best Documentary, and won the award for best documentary at the Message to Man festival in St. Petersburg and the Cinematic Vision Award at the AFI Silverdocs Film Festival. In the 1990s, Victor Kossakovsky turned to Europe to finance his films and ceased receiving funds from Russia after his critique of the Russian government for corruption. He began his collaboration with the Norwegian production company Sant og Usant in 2013 with the 25-minute Varicella. The film premiered in 2015 and was shown in Norwegian cinemas together with two other short documentaries for and with children. Varicella received an honourable mention in the competition program for children’s documentaries at IDFA in 2016, and the same year won the award for best photo and best documentary in less than 30 minutes at Nordic Docs. In 2017, Kossakovsky began working on Aquarela, with Louverture Films as co-producers on the project. Aquarela had its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and was shortlisted for the Oscars for best documentary. Kossakovsky’s most recent collaboration with the two companies resulted in the film Gunda, which Sant og Usant produced and Louverture Films co-produced. Gunda was mainly filmed at the Grøstad farm in Norway. The film had its world premiere at the Berlinale in 2020, where it was met with rave reviews and became one of the festival’s great “talkies.” The film had its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The film went on to be Oscar-shortlisted and won numerous awards internationally, as well as winning two Amanda Film awards for best cinematography and sound, and becoming the official Norwegian candidate to the Nordic Film prize. Gunda was distributed in over seventy countries. Kossakovsky's last film Architecton premiered in 2024 in competition at the Berlin Film Festival to great critical response.