Last and First Men

The narrator speaks from two billion years in the future. The eighteenth and last species of humanity now lives on Neptune and is about to end, which is why it is addressing us. On screen are monuments built in Yugoslavia: abstract, enormous, made of concrete, and abandoned today. Jóhann Jóhannsson directs and composed the music. Tilda Swinton narrates. The source is Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel Last and First Men. Jóhannsson was a film composer; Sicario, Arrival and The Theory of Everything are his. This was the first and only feature he directed; he died in 2018 before it was finished and his colleagues completed it. The images were shot on 16mm black and white. The camera moves very slowly around the monuments; there is nothing else, no people, no event. The monuments are real. Built in Yugoslavia to commemorate the Second World War, most were left untended after the country broke apart and what they stand for became uncertain; the film uses them as ruins belonging to the future. It screened at the 2020 Berlin film festival. It runs about seventy minutes and stands less as a narrative than somewhere between a concert and an installation. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental cinema, science fiction texts and Jóhannsson's music. Who it is not for: there is no story, the pace is very slow, and the film rests entirely on sound and image standing together.