It's Not Silence (2018)
★★★ — It's Not Silence (2018)
Pyramiden is one of those places that sounds like it should be fictional: a Soviet-era coal mining settlement on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, built to showcase the best that communism could offer, and then abandoned almost overnight when the Russian mining company Arktikugol wound down operations in the late 1990s. At its peak the town housed well over a thousand residents, complete with a cultural centre, sports facilities and a farm that reportedly supplied fresh produce despite sitting at nearly eighty degrees north. Today the buildings remain largely as they were left, a kind of accidental time capsule sitting in one of the most remote corners of the planet. It is, by any measure, a genuinely strange and arresting subject for a film.
Finnish director Joonas Salo brought a camera to this peculiar corner of the world for It's Not Silence, a short documentary running to just twenty-five minutes and released in 2018. Finland has a track record of producing films with a cool, observational eye for the world around them, something you can pick up in very different ways if you look at other Finnish productions like The Match Factory Girl (1990) or Unknown Soldier (2017), and Salo's approach here fits that tradition of letting the subject speak without excessive intervention. The film follows the small handful of people, credited as Alexander Romanovskiy, Yevgeniya Tanaseychuk, Zheka Taganay and Vladimir Prokofyev, who keep Pyramiden ticking over as guides, cooks and hotel staff for the tourist groups that make the journey each year. They are, between visits, essentially alone in an almost-empty town on an Arctic island, without internet or phone connections. It is a striking premise for any documentary, short or feature-length.
The format Salo chooses is relatively plain, leaning on interviews with the residents rather than a narrator guiding the viewer through the history or geography. There is no grand cinematic apparatus at work here, and the production company behind the film is not publicly documented. What the film has instead is access and atmosphere, the kind of quiet that you cannot manufacture and the faces of people living a life most of us would find genuinely difficult to imagine. For anyone who enjoys the documentary form at its more stripped-back end, it sits comfortably alongside other short and focused non-fiction work, as I have found with films like Nom Tèw (2009) and Next Goal Wins (2014), where the subject matter does a great deal of the heavy lifting.
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.
For me, that balance between the film's modest ambitions and its genuinely fascinating location is what makes it work. A place like Pyramiden could easily carry a feature-length treatment, so the fact that this stays tight and lets the interviews breathe without overstaying its welcome is a sensible call. I would have happily sat with a little more context around the history, but then wanting more is rarely a complaint worth dwelling on. Sometimes twenty-five minutes is exactly enough to open a door, even if it does not take you all the way through.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-09-09
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Finland: The Match Factory Girl (1990) · Unknown Soldier (2017)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
