I found the above online. There were so many shots I wanted to save and study, but MUBI, understandably, blocks screenshotting. So I will have to wait for this marvellous film to be made available on physical media one day. I really wanted some shots of the nuclear plant model that looks like a set from JOE 90.
The film is a tour of a Lithuanian nuclear power plant in the process of being decommissioned. As the director herself says here:
The project takes a geological approach – it reads things that compose this flat landscape as a stack of stratigraphic layers. Burial is an intertwined section through the current entanglement of identities, spatial practices, infrastructures and geological resources.
There are long takes of control panels, banks of buttons and dials, documenting the immense invention that went into keeping a piece of the sun in bondage. This plant is a twin of Chernobyl: the sister that lived. But, as part of the terms of Lithuania joining the EU, it was ordered to be decommissioned. Nobody had ever immediately shut down and dismantled a nuclear plant of this size before. It takes decades. In the years 2010 to 2022 the process had generated 64000 tons of waste. It’s ongoing. It won’t be done till 2038, by which time that tonnage will at least triple.
It is a beautifully shot film. Technically a documentary, but using the tools of art film and fiction, creating allusions, magical images, dream logics. It moves through uranium mines, underwater atomic mausoleums, mountains under which nuclear waste will be sunk, soars over forests of pylons. The firm dissolves into an imagistic nuclear fugue. The sound design is excellent, and the whole thing is powerfully eerie.
I watched BURIAL on MUBI, but it may be available elsewhere.
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