Watch a Til­da Swin­ton-nar­rat­ed clip from Jóhann Jóhannsson’s final film

When he unex­pect­ed­ly passed away in 2018, Jóhann Jóhann­son left behind a mas­sive lega­cy as a com­pos­er of music for film, tele­vi­sion, dance, and the­atre. He was one of his nation’s bright­est lights to shine on the glob­al stage, and now even in death, his rep­u­ta­tion will con­tin­ue to grow.

He spent his final years work­ing on his first fea­ture film as direc­tor, but left it sad­ly unfin­ished when he depart­ed our mor­tal plane. His clos­est col­lab­o­ra­tors com­plet­ed his labor of love posthu­mous­ly, and the fin­ished prod­uct will soon pre­mière at this year’s Berli­nale. But before every­one else gets an eye­ful of Last and First Men, we have an exclu­sive clip to share.

Archi­tec­ture and abstrac­tion inform this exper­i­men­tal debut, a loose adap­ta­tion of Olaf Stapledon’s sci­ence-fic­tion short sto­ry about a race of humans two bil­lion years in the future. The 70-minute film, cap­tured on sump­tu­ous­ly grainy 16mm, com­bines nar­ra­tion of Stapledon’s text cour­tesy of Til­da Swin­ton with an orig­i­nal score from Jóhans­son, and a series of bru­tal­ist stone mon­u­ments erect­ed dur­ing the com­mu­nism years in the coun­tries that once made up Yugoslavia.

It’s a dense effort, trac­ing con­nec­tions across eons between the 20^th-cen­tu­ry decline of utopi­an hopes and the even­tu­al end of our species. In the clip below, Swin­ton says, ​“Every suc­ces­sive cul­ture has expressed itself in one or more of these supreme mon­u­ments. In their sum­mits, work the hosts of our astronomers, the essen­tial eyes through which our com­mu­ni­ty peers across the bound­less ocean of space.” For the more aus­tere among us, this will be an intense form of ASMR.

The rest of the film will screen in Berlin next week, dou­bling as a strik­ing state­ment from an emerg­ing artist gone too soon, and a trib­ute to his mem­o­ry. Like the gran­ite behe­moths on which he trained his cam­era, Jóhans­son leaves behind a body of work that is mas­sive, tow­er­ing, and unde­ni­ably impressive.