Mesto svetlobe

The documentary film about Šoštanj, the town which is located close to where I grew up, is not meant as a tribute to my childhood or as a continuation of engaged artistic actions I have implemented a few years ago to warn about the issue of a new section of a thermoelectric plant called TEŠ6. However, I guess no one can ever really shake off the images which marked their childhood, especially not when they were so impressive as the ones from the City of Light. For example, I remember early childhood, when the nearby hills had a brown ring made of dying trees, the aftermath of toxic air coming from the plant’s chimney. Later on, I found out that some photographs exist, showing trees that sank in the lake and they were full of slag, white as the snow in the wintertime. It came, again, from the thermoelectric plant. In my first year of school (named by the Partisan hero), I remember big cracks covering the walls of our classroom. They were there because our school was slowly but surely collapsing, a process caused by underground mining. Living in Šoštanj meant living in the world of skewed realism, ignored by the local people. This documentary is not about investigating political facts or suspicious millions on the bank accounts of ex CEOs of thermoelectric plants, millions for which they don’t have a proper explanation. This documentary is about entering into the worlds of people who are living in Šoštanj. We’re following four families, each of them with their own dreams and fears, all intertwined with a town and its power plant. The protagonists are throughout the film discussing key existential subjects (death, the feature of their children, family relationships, hopes, dreams...) and by that, they’re inevitably showing us, the viewers, the discrepancy between fragile human life and cold, technological, rational logic of the system. The inherent problem of today’s world, where it’s difficult to point out who the enemy is since the interests are always hiding behind the veil of liberal democratic doctrine. Something that appears humanely, necessary, or required for the welfare of the majority.