A visually meditative journey through paradoxes to the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania. The reactors of the largest plant in the Baltics have been shut down since 2009. This Cold War energy complex has provided structure to and influenced many people’s lives, but now the forgotten industrial ghost-like park that surrounds it is overgrown by nature and inhabited by living creatures. This meeting paints a dystopian picture of the present: it simultaneously takes a look at the outcomes of a nuclear paranoia that has not really passed and skips the lesson about not worrying and loving the atomic bomb.

This documentary mosaic by Emilija Škarnulytė, one of the new generation of Lithuanian directors, has captured the zeitgeist – the Cold War 2.0 is currently playing out in the minds of many countries’ citizens, especially considering the current geopolitical turmoil and energy crisis. Škarnulytė calls the visually and aurally pulsating work, which premiered at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, “a stack of stratigraphic layers”. The film confidently and convincingly juggles the destructive human inventions of nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and nuclear waste, leading our gaze through a labyrinth of human contradictions.