The way we madeEurope Endless  - "a la Chris Marker" - had almost no set goals, other than to make a hymn in praise of Europe. It was just after Brexit, when my long-time collaborator Christopher Roth and I had just finished making a film about John Berger with Tilda Swinton. That made enough money for us to finance a short shoot in Ireland. As we moved along the Irish border that now separates Britain from Europe, we quickly learned that the border would never reappear. The political lesson was clear.

My  parents were both Irish and had emigrated to England just before I was  born. I had grown up an Irish-English hybrid, but I had never been to the Irish county of Cavan, the ancestral home of the MacCabes. My friend, the great Irish writer Patrick McCabe, had long promised me a tour of this county full of McCabes. This became the kick-off for a much more ambitious Europe Endless project, under the Jarman Lab banner, generously funded by the Pannonia Foundation and Criterion, and produced with my friend Adam Bartos, a long-time patron.

After Ireland, we filmed in Italy, my second home: marble, vineyards, donkey races, olive oil, and although I didn't want to appear in the film, my son Fergus, my (Italian) grandchildren and many of my friends soon joined in. It ended up being a film about me and my ideals. Television  in the 1970s, Jean Luc Godard, cultural studies and the film magazine Screen, André Bazin's thesis 'Better films, Better World' and the thinking of Antonio Gramsci. The latter in particular shows us how utopia can become  realpolitik. Gramsci was the spirit behind the 'historic compromise' that the Italian Communist Party was about to reach with the Christian Democrats. Enrico Berlinguer with Aldo Moro. But then Moro was kidnapped and killed by left-wing radicals. That was the end of Eurocommunism and one of the saddest moments of my life. Chris Marker's method of filmmaking, the collection of found footage,  combined with interviews and voice-overs, is both extremely economical - because the shooting is articulated with other activities - and it puts enormous faith in the editing. And, of course,  you can always keep shooting. So Christopher wanted me to walk around London with another long-time collaborator, Akshi Singh. Show her where my father's bars were, and therefore where I grew up. A long conversation with my friend Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic, ties all the footage together. It became a project about friendship. We mixed personal reflections, political history with the history of film, and as we worked, not one but three feature films emerged:  The one I just described is called The Spectre of Eurocommunism, which reflects on the seventies. The second film, Infinite Histories,  begins with the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer, which was attended by more than a million people in Rome in 1984.  Marcello Mastroianni, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini were at the coffin, and all the beautiful footage was shot by Roberto Benigni, Bernardo Bertolucci and a host of colleagues. And there was Mikhail Gorbachev, not yet leader of the USSR, but an admirer of Gramsci and Berlinguer. With Gorbachev came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the huge explosion of hope as the  communist states of Eastern Europe collapsed.  This era is told from the perspective of Lea Ypi, an acclaimed Albanian philosopher and political scientist, and Oana Bogdan, a Brussels-based Romanian architect and short-time secretary of state in Bucharest. Both women were 12 years old when the regimes  in their countries collapsed. The Romanian revolution was bloody, and in Albania the complete liberalisation of the economy led to civil war. Then Darko Suvin, a specialist in utopias and science fiction, born in  the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1930, talks to me about what we can learn from Tito's socialism. Zbigniew Preisner,  Krzysztof Kieślowski's composer, reflects on Poland in the late 1980s  and their European trilogy Blue, White and Red. In Blue, Juliette  Binoche's character tries to complete a piece of music by her late husband called Song for the Unification of Europe. Acclaimed American writers Darryl Pinckney and Ben Lerner provide the "reverse angle". Darryl talks about his time in Berlin when he wrote Black Deutschland,  and Ben, who had a major influence on the tone and text of all three films, has a brief, very funny cameo in Paris, trying to cheer up Christopher at a sad moment.

The third film changes tense as well as genre. Democratic Sicialism The year is 2038, and a series  of never completely specified events have dramatically altered history,  so that society has learned to harness the tremendous potential of immigration, to invent new forms of participatory  politics, and to claim Europe as Utopia, Newropa, Eutopia... Godard and  Kieślowski provide the filmic counterpoint in the first two films. In  the third, Christopher Roth himself uses his fundamental tool of montage to knit all three films together into the promised 'praise song' for Europe. A new cast of younger thinkers and activists, such as the 'digital Marx' Evgeny Morozov from Belarus, the Italian economist and urban thinker Francesca Bria, the Swedish philosopher and professor at Yale Martin Hägglund,  and the British artist-activists Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn, provide new and optimistic perspectives, while participants in the earlier films make briefer appearances. The first two films find plenty to celebrate in Europe's recent history, but their tone becomes often pessimistic. In this third film, Roth plunges into a future in which new grounds for both morality and social and economic organisation are  revealed as a new (Gramscian) 'common sense'.

The voice-over in all three Europe Endless films alternates between Roth's "I" and the  "we" of Jeanne Tremsal, another long-time inspiration. The extremely complex mix of the personal, the social and the economic, which defies easy description or comparison, is not surprising  given Christopher Roth's own multi-media history: a fabled editor, a controversial director, an artist, and a lecturer and curator in  architecture. He does all this not simply by the investigation of ideas,  but by an extraordinarily mesmerising use of the medium of film. Each shot and frame reveal to us the beauty of the everyday, while the soundtrack makes us hear the rhythms of speech and music anew.