You probably haven’t seen Modern Times Forever. Honestly, almost nobody has. Not because it’s some banned underground masterpiece or a lost reel of film buried in a desert, but because of its sheer, overwhelming length.
It’s 240 hours long.
That is ten full days of footage. Think about that for a second. You could fly from New York to Singapore and back several times before this movie hits the halfway mark. It’s a staggering piece of concept art that challenges what we even consider a "movie" to be in the first place. Created by the Danish artist group Superflex, it premiered back in 2011 in Helsinki, and since then, it has lived on mostly as a legend of extreme cinema.
What Modern Times Forever Actually Is (and Isn't)
People hear "ten-day movie" and expect a massive, sprawling epic with thousands of actors or a complex plot that takes weeks to resolve. That isn't what's happening here.
This isn't The Lord of the Rings on steroids.
Modern Times Forever is a "stargazing" film. It’s slow. Brutally slow. The camera stays fixed on the Stora Enso headquarters in Helsinki, a building designed by the famous architect Alvar Aalto. Through the magic of digital manipulation and time-lapse concepts, the film shows the building decaying over thousands of years. It’s a meditation on time, climate change, and the eventual insignificance of human structures.
The building is the protagonist. The weather is the antagonist.
The artists behind Superflex—Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen—wanted to visualize what happens when we aren't around anymore. It’s sort of a poetic, digital erosion. As the days pass (in the film's runtime), the building crumbles. Nature starts to win. The glass breaks, the white facade fades, and the world moves on without the people who built it.
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Why length matters in art
You might wonder why it needs to be 240 hours. Couldn't they just show the building rotting in a neat ninety-minute documentary?
Sure, they could. But the point is the endurance.
Watching Modern Times Forever is supposed to be a physical experience. When it was first projected onto a 40-square-meter screen in Market Square, Helsinki, it ran in real-time. People walked by, went to work, slept, came back the next day, and the building was still there, just a little bit more weathered. It forces you to reckon with a timescale that humans aren't wired to understand. We think in minutes and hours. The film thinks in millennia.
The Logistics of the World’s Second-Longest Film
For a while, this held the record for the longest film ever made. Then, a film called Logistics (2012) came along and ran for 857 hours, basically ruining the "world record" title for everyone else. But Modern Times Forever remains the most famous of the "ultra-long" films because of its visual intent.
It wasn't shot on a camera for ten days straight.
It’s a digital construction. The team used heavy CGI to simulate the passage of time. They looked at how concrete degrades. They looked at how moss grows. They studied the architectural plans of the Stora Enso building to see where it would structurally fail first. It is a highly researched piece of speculative fiction, even if nothing "happens" in the traditional sense.
The Stora Enso building as a symbol
Choosing that specific building wasn't an accident. Stora Enso is a massive paper and pulp company. It represents industry, power, and the way humans extract resources from the earth. By showing their headquarters rotting away over 240 hours, Superflex is making a pretty loud statement about the fragility of global corporations.
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Nature wins. It always wins.
Can You Actually Watch It Today?
This is where things get tricky. You can't just hop on Netflix or Disney+ and find Modern Times Forever. It’s an art installation. Occasionally, it’s shown at contemporary art museums or film festivals that have the space and the guts to run a projector for ten days.
Sometimes, people find snippets of it online. But a snippet defeats the purpose.
The film is meant to be lived with. It’s environmental. You don't "watch" it like you watch The Bear or a Marvel movie. You exist in the same room as it. It’s background noise for the apocalypse.
Does anyone sit through the whole thing?
Probably not. Even the creators likely haven't sat and stared at the screen for 240 consecutive hours without sleeping. If you did, you’d probably have some sort of psychological break. It’s a marathon for the soul. Most viewers catch an hour here or a few hours there.
There's something beautiful about that, though. It mirrors how we experience real buildings. We see them in passing. We notice a crack in the sidewalk one year, a missing brick the next. Modern Times Forever just accelerates that process—very, very slowly.
The Legacy of Superflex's Experiment
Superflex has always been about pushing buttons. They’ve done projects where they flooded a McDonald’s or made "Free Beer." They like to mess with systems. With this film, they messed with the system of time.
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It’s been over a decade since it premiered, and yet people still talk about it. Why? Because it’s an absurdity. In a world of 15-second TikToks and "TL;DR" summaries, a 240-hour movie is an act of rebellion. It demands attention that we are increasingly unable to give.
It's also a reminder of our own mortality. You will die long before the Stora Enso building does in real life. But in the film, you get to see the end of the story. You get to see what happens when the lights go out for good.
Actionable Ways to Experience "Slow Cinema"
If you’re fascinated by the idea of Modern Times Forever but don't have ten days to spend in a Finnish art gallery, you can still dive into this world.
First, look up the works of Superflex. They are one of the most interesting artist collectives working today. Their focus on climate change and social structures is incredibly relevant right now.
Second, check out the "Slow Cinema" movement. Directors like Béla Tarr or Andrei Tarkovsky (though much shorter than 240 hours) use long takes to change how you feel about time. Start with something like Sátántangó. It’s only seven hours. A walk in the park compared to this.
Lastly, think about the spaces you inhabit. Next time you walk past a glass-and-steel skyscraper, imagine it 5,000 years from now. Imagine the vines, the shattered windows, and the silence. That’s the "Modern Times Forever" perspective. It’s a bit dark, sure, but it’s also strangely peaceful.
If you want to track down a screening, keep an eye on major contemporary art hubs like the MoMA in New York or the Tate Modern in London. They are the types of institutions that occasionally bring these behemoths back to life. Just make sure you bring a very comfortable chair and maybe a lot of snacks.