We'll start from the beginning – namely, with the novel. The full title is «Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future». This is a fairly large book, and what you can see in the film is only a small part from the last two chapters. The novel describes the development of humanity over 2 billion years. During this time, 18 species of people changed from the first men – our contemporaries – to the eighteenth men and a huge number of civilizations.

The book is full of details. It impresses the reader with the scale of the events described. Despite the fact that it was written as early as 1930 (just think about it, almost a hundred years ago), Olaf Stapledon showed a large number of new fantastic and futurological ideas of his time, many of which have already come true. He was able to predict such things as the rise of Communists to power in China, the establishment of the European Union, the Americanization of culture throughout the planet, the Cold War and nuclear weapons, pandemics of new type, the development of hydrocarbon reserves in Antarctica, wars over oil shortages, architectural megalomania, alternative energy, genetic engineering, synthetic food, space sail and much more. And if all that came true, then could all the rest come true as well? However, as I said before, none of this is included into the film. The movie is the message of one of the Last men, it's a squeeze from the last chapters and the quintessence of the main idea of Stapledon – the evolution of body and spirit.

This is understandable, you will say. But what are these piles of concrete that we were forced to look at? This is what the people call Spomenik.

At the outset of Tito's new Republic, established from the ashes of that revolution, ambitious plans were laid to create something new, something brave and adventurous – a classless country ruled by the principles of socialism, a population free of ethnic tension, brought together by brotherhood and unity. Yugoslavia's Spomenik project was a part of that grand plan. By 1961, over 14,000 memorial objects had already been constructed across Yugoslavia. By the dismantling of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, although it's not known for sure how many memorial objects have been created, the total number would be well over 40,000 if their creation was at the same rate as in 1945-1961. Such a phenomenal wellspring of memorial construction and the magnitude which the Yugoslav government regarded this project with is distinct and unique, especially compared to other European countries at that time period.

It was a colossal contribution in monument building, unparalleled in Europe. The monoliths towered from seasides to barren mountain-tops, standing as forces which outshone the landscape. In the 1980s, these monuments were visited by millions of people every year, especially by the pioneers for Patriotic education. But many monuments have now been destroyed and left derelict after the war and ethnic conflict in the 1990s which led to the breakup of Yugoslavia into six independent countries and one partially recognized state. Now Spomenik represents the frozen greatness and power of a defunct country. Some monuments are better preserved and some are worse, but they've all almost lost their original meaning, since very few people know about their existence.

Exhibitions with these photos were organized several times. One of them was held in Amsterdam in 2010. Apparently it was then that the future director of the film Jóhann Jóhannsson found out about Spomenik. Jóhann was a great admirer of Stapledon's works, and he had read the novel before he knew about the spomeniks. After seeing them, he came up with a way to create a dialogue between these monuments and the book. Then he began to study the issue and even went to the former Yugoslavia for a few weeks. There Jóhann was shooting spomeniks, and gradually the idea of the film began to crystallize in his mind. When he turned to the operator Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, he already had a clear concept of the future movie.

Shooting began in December, 2014 and didn't last long. The operator described it as follows: "We prepared for a day or two, and then went on a short trip for three weeks. I, Jóhann, assistant cameraman, producer-coordinator and driver. All in all, five guys on the bus and a camera. It was like a tour by a rock band."

With no digital embellishments and no grading – just the 16mm film scanned in high definition – the black-and-white footage recalls science fiction of the 1960s and 70s, the slow deliberate movement of the camera across the massive spaceship exteriors in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1972) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). Jóhann also cites the influence of Fred Kelemen's crawling dolly movements in Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky's The Man from London (2007) and The Turin Horse (2011).

"We wanted to film these sculptures in a very formalistic manner," says Jóhann, "to emphasise their strange asymmetrical beauty. We woke every morning at four o'clock to be ready for the sunrise and stayed outside filming all day until there was no light. It was one of the most happy experiences in my life, and one of the most gruelling."

When it came to voice acting, Jóhann had no doubts. "I wanted it to be read like someone reading from a manual," he says. "From the very first moment, I knew it just had to be Tilda Swinton. There was no one else I imagined. I wanted her narration to sound like a strange academic lecture, tinged with a melancholy lyricism, read by an authoritative voice from the future."

Last and First Men was not originally conceived a film, but a multimedia show – fusion of Tilda Swinton's agender voice, spomenik's symbolic complexity and versatility and extremely emotional music that conveys all the spectrum of feelings. The show premiered on 16 July 2017 at the Manchester International Festival, a biannual international art festival, with a special focus on outstanding new works.

Subsequently, it was decided to shoot a film. All the time before Jóhann passed away, he was engaged in editing, music writing and post-production, but he managed to edit about seventy percent of the film, and most of the remaining work concerned music. It was finalized by a Berlin-based composer and musician Yair Elazar Glotman, who is also listed as the author of the music in the film's credits.

Now that we have sorted out the creation history of the Last and First Men, we can get to the film itself.

It's definitely not for everyone. The pace of the story is very slow – so that you could understand the scale of what is being told, carefully consider the parts of spomeniks, shot close-up. Some people might be annoyed by the rather long pauses between sentences, but it may be not so bad to slow down for a while at this frenzied modern pace of life.

Watching and listening, you gradually realize that what is on the screen almost literally (as literally as possible when we consider metaphors) reflects the words. These are the new meanings that can be discovered in spomeniks. It's amazing how well they fit the text. One of the most striking aspects of the work is how Jóhann's weightless, mournful score accompanies Swinton's elegiac delivery and the camera's slow exploratory movement through these alien landscapes, in harmony with both.