Award Winning Films 2011

Direcor: Michael Madsen

JURY AWARD BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY 2011

Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world's first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.

Into Eternity, Denmark, 2010, 75 min, Director: Michael Madsen, Producer: Lise Lense-Möller / MAGIC HOUR FILMS
www.intoeternitythemovie.com

Into Eternity won the Jury Award as the best feature film of the 1st International Uranium Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro 2011.

About the Film

In that scale we are left by the film director of "Into Eternity" who lights simple matches to show us the endless ways into the tunnels of Onkalo in Finland. The danish filmmaker Michael Madsen invites us to an incredible trip to discover an ambitious project to store safely for more than 100.000 years highly radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants. It was the danish scientist Niels Bohr who helped Fermi to create his experiments. Now Michael Madsen is trying to help us by bringing light into our darkened minds. And many matches are needed in Brazil. Into Eternity has further qualities, that made it a winner of the Uranium Film Festival in his category, such as photography and original script. The film attracts our attention during the whole travel through the tunnels and caverns of Onkalo like the Egyptian Pyramids.

João Luiz Leocadio

Nuclear Engineer and Professor of the Department of Cinema & Video of the Federal Fluminense University (UFF)

Director's Statement

I am interested in the areas of documentary filmmaking where additional reality is created. By this I mean, that I do not think reality constitutes a fixed entity which accordingly can be docu-mented - revealed - in this or that respect. Instead, I suspect reality to be dependent on and susceptible to the nature of it's interpretation.

I am in other words interested in the potentials and requirements of how reality can be - and is – interpreted. The ONKALO project of creating the worlds first final nuclear waste facility capable of lasting at least 100 000 years, transgresses both in construction and on a philosophical level all previous human endeavours. It represents something new. And as such I suspect it to be emblematic of our time - and it a strange way out of time, a unique vantagepoint for any documentary.

Michael Madsen

Thursday June 28th 2012, 16h00