WALKING ON WATER

Walking on Water follows internationally renowned environmental artist – and Paounov's fellow countryman – Christo on his quest to realize "The Floating Piers," originally conceived in 1970 by Christo and his late wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude. In 2016, seven years after Jeanne-Claude's death, this stunning, site-specific masterpiece – which allows visitors to walk across a great stretch of water, buoyed by polyethylene cubes draped in luminous yellow fabric – was finally cleared to be mounted on Italy's Lake Iseo, which lies at the foot of the Alps. But securing a location proved to be only the first step in a tumultuous process of creative problem solving and prickly negotiations.

Walking on Water gives us a rare look into the business of large-scale art production – and the sort of temperament required to bestow unto the world something that feels close to a miracle.

Thom Powers, Toronto International Film Festival

“That was the challenge of making the film. There was so much footage that it took me three months just watching it 10 hours a day, every day. There was no pre-concept or general direction in what the crews shot. We had no idea what was there. I had assistants and we were watching together, exchanging files, and finding out what was there. At one point, I started finding some tracks in the footage and what I was interested finding a character piece from all this chaos. Luckily, we live in the digital age, so there were days of cameras rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. In between all this stuff, there were brilliant little pieces where you could see him and all the relationships with the family behind the Christo project. That’s how we started putting this puzzle together.”

Andrey Paounov for Powmagazine.com