Pipeline

Built in 1983, Russia’s Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline connected natural gas supplies in West Siberia with eager consumers in Western Europe. Thirty years later, celebrated filmmaker Vitaly Mansky takes stock of its impact, tracing the route above ground through seven countries and even more socio-political strata in this award-winning visual essay. Brilliantly observed long takes of everyday life turn up eccentric characters and quirky locales. An Orthodox priest works door-to-door in an agnostic village, a frozen journalist reports on a mammoth gold statue in the centre of nowhere. But as the film tracks ever westward, the grass literally gets greener and the people larger. Beyond contrasting poverty with wealth, the ordinariness of each tableau takes on new meaning when read together with the others, literally from right to left. Savvy and beautiful, Pipeline visually traces the disparity between people who live above untold wealth and those who actually enjoy it.