Into Eternity, Micheal Madsen

Inspired by the abstraction of the 1960s films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Madsen has tried to turn Onkalo into a kind of psychic space in which to explore complex issues about what it means to be human. "I needed to extract as much visual power out of the facility and nature to create a space for the audiences to project their own feelings into the film," says Madsen. "The more you can make your film play 'inside' people, I think, the better."

The issues debated by the scientists and engineers interviewed are truly heady: Onkalo is so poisonous it must never be dug up once it is sealed, sometime in the 21st century. But how do we stop that? Is it better if the site is remembered as a place of fear and death? Or forgotten? Should it be marked with hieroglyphic monoliths? Or a landscape of concrete thorns? Edvard Munch's The Scream is cited as an image that speaks beyond language. Or should Onkalo just be left to be erased by the next ice age?