With the nuclear era less than 70 years old, an estimated 300,000 tons of deadly radioactive waste already exist in the world today. Current above-ground storage facilities—subject to natural and man-made disasters—are only temporary solutions to a totally unprecedented problem. Five kilometers below the earth, the people of Finland are constructing an enormous tomb as the final resting place for their share of the waste. Dubbed "Onkalo" (Finnish for "hiding place"), the three-mile tunnel should be sealed by the year 2100 and must remain untouched for at least 100,000 years. One hundred thousand years.

In this poetic, hauntingly beautiful documentary, Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen talks with Scandinavia's top nuclear energy experts and descends into the murky tunnel with the men who blast the rock, but his treatment of this mind-bending and terrifying subject is more philosophical than academic: How far into the future does our way of life have consequences? How can we warn civilizations of the distant future that the buried treasure of our nuclear era—unlike the pyramids and great tombs of pharaohs—must never, ever be discovered?

Michael Madsen is a Danish conceptual artist and filmmaker whose works have screened around the world. They include the award-winning documentary To Damascus and Celestial Night. He is currently developing the films The Black Forest and The Colonel.

I am interested in the areas of documentary filmmaking where additional reality is created. By this I mean, that I do not think reality constitutes a fixed entity that accordingly can be documented—revealed—in this or that respect. Instead, I suspect reality to be dependent on and susceptible to the nature of its interpretation. I am in other words interested in the potentials and requirements of how reality can be—and is—interpreted.

The ONKALO project of creating the worlds first final nuclear waste facility capable of lasting at least 100,000 years transgresses both in construction and on a philosophical level all previous human endeavors. It represents something new. And as such I suspect it to be emblematic of our time—and in a strange way out of time, a unique vantage point for any documentary.