Monika Koeck: Producer, Director, Key Cast

LEFT BEHIND is an emotional portrait of Liverpool's famous Tobacco Warehouse (1901); a grade II listed building that is considered being the largest brick building in the world. Today, the industrial warehouse lies empty in a vast and abandoned dock landscape.
The expressive space portrayed in the film is inhabited by an enigmatic figure that, in terms of its scale and appearance, seems to live in a symbiosis with the building and its site.
LEFT BEHIND offers a mysterious "vision" of a warehouse that is today a "shadow of itself". The short film circles around the themes of presence/absence, empty landscapes, beauty/grace and, by demonstrating that the site is not as "left behind" as perhaps thought, offers a hopeful glimpse into the future of its development.

Monika is a professionally trained architect, dancer and award-winning filmmaker. She is a Cambridge University graduate whose artistic work is shown on festivals and exhibitions world-wide.
Monika Koeck started her career as a professional ballet dancer, before entering the world of architecture and filmmaking. Monika taught architectural design as Visiting Professor in the US and Research Associate in the field of architecture and film at the University of Cambridge. Monika is founding director of the Liverpool-based film/architecture production and post-production company CineTecture Ltd and holds a part-time teaching position at the University of Liverpool.

Monika has a large portfolio of academic, commercial, and art-based moving image productions. In her artistic Oeuvre, her work emphasises the creative use of the ‘body in motion’ as well as the use of ‘space’ and ‘screen space’ as a narrative expressive element. In terms of research, her specialty is the production of films, digital animations and motion graphics that emphasise and illustrate complex themes in an understandable and accessible way to allow for greater impact.
Her artistic work regularly features at major international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale in Architecture (2000) and the German IBA Exhibition (International Building Exhibition 2004, 2005), The Beyond Media Festival (Florence, 2009), the Filmforum (Udine, 2009), The Architecture & Design Festival (New York, 2010; Chicago 2011), The Film Casino (Vienna, 2011), in a curated show in the Fondazione Maxxi (Rome, 2011) and recently at The Arts Institute of Guangdong, China. Her film ‘Liverpool(e): Mover, Shaker, Architectural Risk-Taker’ was the opening exhibition film for RIBA’s new branch and gallery space in the North.
Since then she created audio-visual content (film and soundscape) for the second exhibition at RIBA North, Ceramica. >Recently, she worked on 2 Virtual Reality projects, one was featured at Liverpool’s International Festival of Business in June 2018, making Liverpool’s iconographic pieces of architecture to experience in interactive immersive film (stereoscopic 360 degrees), the second is a project for FutureCity London and the London Bridge Team, featuring a Happening on 1 March 2018, over 100 people from over 20 choirs performed IMAGINE amongst the London Bridge Station concourse crowds, while Yoko Ono's IMAGINE PEACE played across the screens, to announce a Culture Plan for the Front Stage of London. The VR film was presented to Yoko Ono as a present for her 85th birthday.
Monika won the prestigious TVe Global Sustainability Film Award in 2013, was nominated for it 2018 and won it again in 2019.
She was awarded Best Documentary Short Award of Excellence 2020 at Vegas Movie Awards and Award of Merit Documentary Short 2020 at Impact Docs Awards.