Director´s Statement

I wanted to explore how public documents, maps and thresholds create a formal space for decision-making, but also how that space has a shape, and the shape excludes a great deal.

A landscape cannot speak in the terms required of it. Landowners and neighbours can try, but there is rarely room for what they actually know. What enters the room is a narrow slice of what is at stake, and decisions are made on that basis, on behalf of everything that could not fit through the door.

I live and work near Fensfeltet in Telemark, Norway, where a proposed rare earth extraction project has drawn the area into such a process. I have sat in public meetings and information evenings, read consultation documents and impact assessments, and talked with neighbours, landowners and others whose knowledge of the place runs generations deep, but rarely fits the designated formats.

The impact assessment for Fensfeltet did not conclude "no significant impact." It concluded the opposite, and stated significant negative consequences, across all four areas under consideration, with a recommendation to avoid. The site subsequently chosen by the municipality was assessed as the least suitable of the four. The title of this film is borrowed from a phrase that carries real weight in bureaucratic systems, a phrase that, in this instance, the process refused to use, and that the decision ignored anyway.

Nothing in this is done in bad faith, and that is precisely what interests me. The film is fiction, but every sentence in it has a relative in a real document.