Vostok, Faretheewell

Vostok, Faretheewell explores the city of Berlin, and uses it as a lens to examine various modes of suspension, of incompleteness, of being in-between.

The film follows Yukitomo, a Japanese designer who, while touristing in Berlin, is unexpectedly called by a Korean movie company to create the 3D computer model for a space ship (named the Vostok – after the Soviet human spaceflight programme that succeeded in putting a person into Earth's orbit for the first time) in a Science Fiction film. We follow Yukitomo as he takes photos not of the great vistas of Berlin, but close-ups of surface details and materials, which he uses to "skin" the model of his space ship.

The film is about visions (artistic, political, architectural) as forms of power, and about the de-formations and re-formations they endure on encountering the material world. Graydon traces this in Yukitomo’s struggle to design his model, and in a parallel narrative about the history of Berlin itself, as written in its architectural environments. It is a history of power and conflicting ideas of order, each leaving overlapping traces in the city’s material reality.