It's Not Silence (2018)
★★★ — It's Not Silence (2018)
Joonas Salo's short documentary finds its subject in Pyramiden, a Soviet-era mining settlement on the Svalbard archipelago that was established by the USSR in the 1920s and largely vacated after a 1996 air disaster killed most of its workforce. At its peak the town housed around a thousand residents and was considered a showcase of Soviet civic planning, complete with a cultural centre, swimming pool, and Lenin statue. Salo, a Finnish filmmaker working in the short documentary form, shot on location in Svalbard with a cast of the settlement's actual small permanent population, giving the film an observational, almost ethnographic quality. The project sits comfortably within a modest tradition of Scandinavian-produced Arctic documentary filmmaking, running to just twenty-five minutes.
A-Z World Movie Tour Svalbard https://youtu.be/AOQlPTjkU_0?si=gTEHTDqtndSr8KWv What a fantastically interesting documentary. It focuses on the now abandoned coal mining town of Pyramiden in Svalbard. Inhabited by 6-10 permanent staff members and running regular tourist groups. It's fantastic to see how life is for these individuals on Svalbard. Pretty one-not documentary which is more of a series of interviews than a narrated documentary. Still... at 25 minutes long it's perfect length.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-09-09
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