Screening with director Volker Sattel
The elegant camera of Volker Sattel provides a dispassionate 'tour' of facilities related to the nuclear industry in Germany and Austria. This look inside atomic power stations, both active and never-activated, as well as research and training facilities, repositories for nuclear waste, and the attendant equipment and bureaucracies, calmly catalogs how the elements of this twentieth-century technology appear today. Sattel's meticulous compositions aestheticize this remarkable, complex enterprise. His footage feels, by turns, unimaginable, futuristic, utopian, and menacing. Adopting the measured, documentary tone of an industrial film, this unsensationalized meditation on the phenomenon of 'Reaktors' packs a thought-provoking, man/machine wallop. Sattel will speak at the screening. In German with English subtitles.