Unter Kontrolle

A tour of different places related to the nuclear industry in Germany and Austria: active and disused nuclear power stations, training facilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency, an institute for risk research, the Annual Meeting on Nuclear Technology, a permanent repository for radioactive waste, as well as research centers. A filmic contribution to contemporary industrial and technological history. The images are breathtaking: A fuel rod is slowly accompanied by the camera. Countless brightly blinking lights on the control room panels like in the cockpit of a spaceship. A long journey into the depths of a storage shaft. A giant vertical swing in the cooling tower of the fast breeder reactor in Kalkar, which never went into operation. Monumental domes and desolate ruins. Images that bear witness to fascination and menace, tragedy and risk in equal measure; that demonstrate the monstrous technology and the utopian project. Images that are a cross between science fiction and an industrial film. Carefully composed and framed in Cinemascope. An idiosyncratic examination of a dangerous technology, an insight into a hermetic world – and most of all a film about the aesthetics of one of the 20th century’s technologies and its buildings.