A creative documentary by Misho Antadze and Peter Hammer
Production: near/by film

The green-grocer and the sailor, the widow and the homesick engineer.  Scattered across the world, everyday people maintain a network of stations listening for nuclear explosions. They may be humanity’s first line of defense against catastrophe.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty Organisation (CTBTO)  is a joint effort from all the nations that signed the treaty on banning all nuclear testing. Together they have built an intricate network of  monitoring stations which, through various technologies, register the  tiniest indications of nuclear explosions anywhere on the globe. 

Director's statement

"At first glance, you wouldn’t suspect it: the green-grocer and the nomad, the ageing widow and the homesick engineer may be our first line of defence against annihilation. Scattered across the Earth, they maintain some of the 321 stations attuned to the faint signals of nuclear explosions. In the meantime, this network hears what human ears cannot: whales and calving icebergs, meteors, and the deep rumblings of volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Yet alongside this sense of wonder lies a growing urgency. When our research began four years ago, nuclear testing—let alone war— seemed improbable. Today, geopolitical earthquakes make the risk impossible to ignore. The stations monitor for nuclear events and send data to UN headquarters in Vienna, where highly trained scientists analyse it for confirmation. In today’s world, by the time they identify one, it may already be too late.

Is this idealistic attempt to prevent nuclear war futile? For now, the Listeners maintain the machinery, answering the call when needed—in Germany and Kazakhstan, in Norway, Cape Verde, and Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most remote inhabited island.

Venturing into the landscapes around them, our film finds a  mythology of the nuclear age: in Bavaria, deer refuse to cross  the old Iron Curtain, carrying the genetic memory of electrified fences; on Svalbard, a geopolitical anomaly has allowed Russia and Norway to share the Arctic archipelago for a century, but tensions are now igniting a new micro–Cold War. In Kazakhstan, the USSR left an indigenous village on the steppe where it once tested nuclear weapons. Their descendants now believe they must live on radioactive land to survive.

Our approach is observational—we look and listen to the Listeners, the landscapes, and the sounds captured by the network. In these landscapes, we find the mythologies of the Cold War. The lingering ghosts might be omens of our shared future. In the persistence of ordinary people carrying out everyday tasks to prevent nuclear war, we find hope. And in the sounds captured by the listening stations, we hear the beauty of a world still worth saving."

images from the first film shoots in Mayo, Cape Verde, and Freyung, Germany

website Misho Antadze
website Peter Hammer