As is sometimes the case, things happen by chance. Damien Faure was in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago lost in the Arctic, scouting locations for a documentary on the Seed Vault, the concrete architecture that sinks into the icy rock and serves as the ultimate refuge for seeds collected from all over the world in the fateful event of a climatic or nuclear disaster. He discovered a strange ghost town not far from there, named Pyramiden (Пирамида in Russian) after the shape of a mountain at the foot of which it was founded by the Swedes in 1910, then bought by the USSR in 1926 to allow a mining company to set up there to exploit the coal-rich subsoil, This created a colony of typically Soviet architecture (right down to the bust of Lenin) on Norwegian soil, which was left untouched after the occupants left unexpectedly when mining operations ceased in 1998 – with all traces of past life still intact: books on the library shelves, toys on the nursery floor, clothes on hangers, right down to the film reels still loaded on the cinema projectors.

Second chance: just as the shooting of the documentary on the botanical sanctuary was financed and ready to start, the Covid-19 crisis interrupted the project and, when the borders reopened, the people associated on the spot with this documentary and for whom they were to be the protagonists had scattered, making it impossible to complete the work. It was then that the idea was born of moving from Seed Vault to Pyramiden/Пирамида, but also from documentary to fiction. One of Damien Faure’s constant questions as a filmmaker is to see how, through the device of framing, you can make a character evolve in a given space. In this specific location of Pyramiden/Пирамида, the formal and suggestive power of this Soviet architectural incongruity as if fallen from the sky amidst glaciers, and occasionally crossed by jaded reindeer, then offered a plastic frame, architecture, like the film’s hero, took on the quality of a character and a critical physicality.

In another fruitful surprise, the reels Damien Faure found intact on site in the cinema’s control room appear stealthily in the montage throughout the film, showing the life of the inhabitants immortalized on film by themselves, and presenting in flickering black and white these same inhabited architectures and a form of political and social utopia overplayed in front of the lens. The architecture in the image is then superimposed on itself as much as on the viewer’s imagination of this strange visual and emblematic ballet.

For all these reasons, “Pyramiden” produces one of those alchemies that makes this work a logical part of the itinerary between cinema and architecture that the Forum proposes, edition after edition, as part of the OVNi festival, showing how short fiction films, art videos, documentaries and archival “exquisite cadavers” (according to the genres we’ve covered) are formidable revelations of architecture.
However, “Pyramiden” takes on a twofold novelty here. Firstly, because the film will not be released in cinemas until January 1, 2025, it will be shown at the Forum in advance. But also because of its form: as its duration of an hour and a quarter is hardly compatible with a program that can easily be viewed in a loop in an exhibition logic, Damien Faure has agreed to show here only selected fragments, chosen for the narrative intensity of their representation of the architecture, thus creating a filmic object parallel to the complete work, in a format that will exist only once, at the Forum, in an appearance of mashup3 mixed with a furtive evocation of found footage. All the more reason to enjoy it without restraint.

Damien Faure graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Etienne (Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique, Option Audiovisuelle) with honors, making him a filmmaker well-versed in the art world. He experiments with ways of filming that arise from listening to the places in which he takes his camera. The subjects dealt with in his films interact with his posture and methods as a filmmaker to reveal singular worlds. He began his career as a filmmaker working on a forgotten war in West Papua. He filmed the struggle of Papuan independence movements from clandestine military camps nestled in the jungle to the United Nations headquarters in New York. Three documentary films emerged from this experience, winning awards at festivals around the world: “West Papua” and “Sampari”, broadcast on France Télévision, and “La Colonisation oubliée”, broadcast on ARTE. Between 2011 and 2016, he directed a diptych consisting of the films “Espaces intercalaires” (presented by the Forum in 2015) and “Milieu”, which takes us to the heart of “ma”, a Japanese term meaning interval. Among other things, “ma” is present in architecture, in love relationships, in nature, and in man’s relationship with the gods. This diptych was released in cinemas in November 2017. In 2018, he is co-directing a ten-episode, five-minute webseries on the history of the Shadoks for ARTE Creative, with the voice of Benoît Poelvoorde. “Le Tour d’un monde”, his latest film, is released in cinemas in March 2022, a ‘mashup’ of some of his images that have remained off-screen and which he has brought out again to assemble them differently so that they create another vision of the world. In February 2023, he joined ACID (Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion) and became a member of the board, and was one of the fourteen programming filmmakers for the selection of nine films for ACID Cannes 2024. “Pyramiden” is his first feature-length fiction film, to be released in cinemas from January 1, 2025, and has already been presented in official selection at AFFR/Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam 2023, Sydney Film Festival 2024, Arctic Film Festival 2024, and in international competition at Trento Film Festival 2024.