Florian Yuriev’s studio is covered in harmonious colour palettes and paintings. Handmade violin bodies, sketches, and drawings rest next to them. “I do everything at the same time. That’s what happens to left-handed people,” says the elderly man. A tireless artist and architect, Florian is led by the musical laws of form and science, epitomised by his best-known project, the so-called Flying Saucer, or the Kyiv Institute of Information in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Ocean Plaza shopping centre nearby is expanding at the expense of this “modernist disc” and its investors are threatening the very existence of this Soviet heritage monument.

A few months before the film was completed, Florian Yuriev (1929-2021) passed away, leaving behind his polysystemic modernist works. The architect’s zeal in defending his work reveals the film’s central struggle: the pull between an uncritical, superficial capitalism that overrides the public good on the one side, and the reality of Eastern European bureaucracy and kleptocracy on the other. Researcher Oleksiy Radinsky has created a psychological documentary detective story with the architect as investigator, but the scope of the film resonates beyond Ukraine into the intertwined problems of the art of construction in the Baltic States.