Louidgi Beltrame’s work is based on documenting modes of human organisation throughout the history of the 20th century. He travels to sites defined by a paradigmatic relation to modernity: Hiroshima, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Chandigarh, Tchernobyl or the mining colony of Gunkanjima, over the sea off Nagasaki. His films - based on the recording of reality and the constitution of an archive - appeal to fiction as a possible way to consider History.

Energodar
2010
Video, 37 min.
Created out of images shot in Ukraine during the summer of 2009, Energodar invites the spectator to an urban wandering supplemented with various sound sources mixing new creations, Russian and British archives, and the personal narrative of several events of the 1970s and 1980s. While the 36-minute film begins with the image of one of the last extant statues of Lenin overlooking the Zaporizhia hydroelectric power plant, it ends with the increasingly oppressive images of the now inactive radar nicknamed “the Russian Woodpecker.” Energodar (the word means “the gift of energy”) touches indirectly on the energetic decay characterizing these regions today. It is also the name of one of these “Atomgrads,” the dormitory cities located near nuclear plants, the remnants of past urban and scientific breakthroughs, at a time when nuclear workers were considered as genuine heroes, right after cosmonauts, as Victor (the narrator) explains.