Empathy for Concrete Things

Five visual artists, together with the filmmaker, examine past and present attitudes towards their homes based on their experiences living and working in Soviet-era concrete, panel-block apartments. Combining compelling personal narrative with experimental research on the history of twentieth-century art and architecture, the film creates a contemporary aesthetic of panel-block mass housing using animation—original watercolors put into motion by stop-motion techniques and digital animation. As global and personal histories interweave, the film explores notions of moral and political responsibility as evinced in postsocialist urban spaces. Empathy for Concrete Things thus considers how architecture can become both a site of utopian fantasy, and a mechanism through which major transformations shaped the history of the twentieth century. As former postsocialist countries are thrust into, 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.

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Director Biography

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 animated documentary film "Empathy for Concrete Things" (2023, 60 minutes) 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 Universit채t Berlin, which are both credited as the film's producers.

Film Poster

Film Stills

All watercolors were original and hand-drawn by Gregory Gan. They were then digitally put to motion by the Gregory, Dina Velikovskaya and Anne Isensee, and composited by Florian Grolig.

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