Sonne unter Tage

Less than a film about the uranium mining operations of the Soviet corporation SAG Wismut in Saxony and Thuringia from 1946 to 1990, Mareike Bernien and Alex Gerbaulet venture a cinematic exploration of the events surrounding the area, which is still contaminated today. Fluorescent ghostly substances appear in dark shafts, environmental activists explore the site, the flashlights that probe ahead find individual figures who tell of their connection to Wismut, and it becomes clear that everything that people snatch from the earth will sooner or later haunt them. What was once supposed to be delivered to the Soviet nuclear power suddenly seeps back into the earth as radioactive rain. The repeated question of the decay date of memory sets in motion a movement that is far from complete. Rarely has a film so consistently understood the soil as an archive, and even more rarely has it found such sensually tangible, aesthetic solutions for what actually seems invisible and in its temporality far exceeds the imagination of us humans. (P.H.)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum