Who could imagine that an experimental documentary about the dismantlement of the world’s largest nuclear plant could also extend to include a survey of 20th century painting, a political statement, a site for meditation and a philosophical song about annihilation and creation being parts of the same process? Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė could imagine precisely that and did so accordingly, and her vision is so spellbinding that it shows how the finest lessons of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in merging art and science can be creatively applied, as can those from the early films of Alain Resnais in executing slow, steady and hallucinatory camera crawls across, into and around documentary subjects. “In my films from the last ten years,” she has said, “I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time.” Thus her opening images offer rocks that resemble planets, a voluptuous nuclear explosion is rhymed with trees and a snake slithering around the same circuitry previously traversed by her camera becomes a bold Surrealist encounter.

Directors: Emilija Skarnulyte
Writers: Emilija Skarnulyte
Producers: Elisa Fernanda Pirir, Dagne Vildziunaite
Composers: Gaute Barlindhaug
Cinematographers: Audrius Budrys, Eitvydas Doskus, Adam Khalil, Emilija Skarnulyte
Runtime: 1h 0mn
Country: Lithuania, Norway
Language: Lithuanian