She finds herself unable to reconcile her baby’s needs with the demands of her own selfhood: "To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet.

I read this sitting in the foot-high summer grass that grew through the terrace, above a wild sea of rhododendron bushes. It was, perhaps, our isolation - idyllic though it was - that sealed these events in a profound melancholy from which I subsequently found myself unable to escape. The film is about people who will not complete their work in their lifetime, and I had heard from a few people that Soleri became angry when he was asked, “when will Arcosanti be finished? Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life's Work. My previous film, Tango Octogenario, took a long, circuitous and bizarre route to the eyes of a programmer for New Directors/New Films, the showcase put on by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.The film’s personal, deep emotional roots will, I believe, contribute immeasurably to its power and make it a unique film.

This resulted in a few people wanting to screen it for their organization or their school, and I love doing that just as much as screening at a festival. When I was nine I was told that medieval cathedrals took hundreds of years to construct, that their architects would not see them completed, that generations of stonemasons would work on them.At other times, finding she misses her daughter while she is sleeping, she lies down beside her cradle. I was forced to communicate deeply and personally with so many people, and so many different kinds of people–academics, farmers, geneticists, astronomers, architects, city planners, record collectors, DJs, antiquities experts, students, ministers, singers, to name a few. Alongside her personal narrative, Cusk offers reflections on the experience of motherhood more broadly, drawing on literary depictions of parenthood. Even when she is not breastfeeding, every moment of her life is accounted for: there are no “lubricant empty hours” in which she can reflect, regroup, and feel herself again. By the time the book came out, she was one and a half, her sister three: that summer I peacefully harvested the gooseberry bushes at the back of the house, swam in the ornamental lake, shooed out the bats that sometimes flew around the rafters of our room on summer evenings.

Sometimes all the marketing in the world won’t make things like that happen, and sometimes dumb luck will. If everyone were to read this book," it said, "the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame. I went into town and bought a newspaper, and turning the pages came across the first review of A Life's Work. Cusk feels alienated by the advice of healthcare professionals, the official literature on childcare, and the perspectives of her peers at mother-and-baby groups. Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced.Sometime during my grief, this time of sorrow and contemplation about purpose and legacy, I thought about the cathedrals and the idea for A Life’s Work was born. It was a beautiful place in the Brendon Hills in Somerset, the rattling ghost of a grand estate, where a miniature ornamental lake still languished in the overgrown pleasure gardens, and the trees in the neglected orchard shed rare red, heart-shaped apples like the apples in a medieval tapestry. It was my sincere belief that nobody would read it or care about it, and in all honesty I didn't blame them.

All through a drizzling Exmoor winter I had been writing a book, in a tiny rented place up on the moor where we stayed while we looked for somewhere to live. David Licata (DL):I began editing the film myself for financial reasons, but I knew I wasn’t doing the idea and the footage justice.

Andy and Wolfgang have that gift few people have: they instinctively know (after many years of experience) what to shoot, where to put the camera, and how to light the shot. There is a robust Facebook page dedicated to the film and my personal Instagram account, which has some film-related posts. The film focuses on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question.