Program 2

Short film program consisting of GAZING... UNSEEING, SURFACE RITES, and SONNE UNTER TAGE

Total running time approx. 71 min.

Gazing... Unseeing

GAZING… UNSEEING speculatively envisions a dystopian future scenario of an Egyptian city post-disaster. Floods have taken over the West Sahara, setting off a string of corporate and governmental measures to control the rioting population. The film is based on an interview with an imagined fugitive. Through different positions, ideological turns, and questions on economic sovereignty, the interview imagines the future of the greens’, governments’, and private sectors’ relations to infrastructure, privatization, ecology, surveillance, and migration.

Surface Rites

A young Slovakian immigrant opens a uranium mine near Elliot Lake in northern Ontario, Canada, and later builds a massive replica of the modest church from his childhood village. Stranded amongst suburban streets named after prize-winning Holstein cows, now sits this monumental cathedral, unfinished and private. Teenage zombies emerge from lakes and rivers around Serpent River First Nation, once poisoned with uranium waste. There is talk of eugenics at a Holstein pageant, and a retired dairy farmer and his wife remember a recurring dream where their work is never done.

Sonne Unter Tage

A the village edge runs a gravel path, through fields and up to the fence, charted on the map of former uranium mining sites in Saxony and Thuringia. From 1946 to 1990 the Soviet corporation SAG Wismut mined uranium there for the USSR’s atomic weapons program. Above, socialism radiates into the future, below, an ancient rock radiates out of the torn up earth. The GDR environmental movement shines a light on the path. Night. Darkness. A group of people, a flashlight, a strip of x-ray film is buried in the gravel. The ground exposes the film, leaving behind a trace of its invisible rays. The film SONNE UNTER TAGE follows this trace horizontally through the landscapes of today, marked by dismantling and restructuring, and vertically through the ground as an archive. Deep boreholes through space and time track the sedimented narratives surrounding the element uranium, materially, metaphorically, and geopolitically. How does it haunt the landscape? How is it linked to the ghost of socialism? What biographies rearrange and beleaguer the sites of its excavation? How does it continue to radiate in the media that record it? How can the spectrum of the visible be shifted in order to bring its invisible rays into the image, to make it possible to hear them or feel them?