Minot, North Dakota

Directors: Cynthia Madansky and Angelika Brudniak
Music: Zeena Parkins
16 mm, Video ◊ 8 min.

Established in the late 1950s, the Air Force base outside of Minot, North Dakota houses 150 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Buried underground, out of sight, they have been directed towards Russia for over half a century. Minot, North Dakota explores the irony, anxiety, and ideological implications of this site as it reverberated in the present throughout the adjacent community.

The filmmakers employ interviews with locals throughout, but—like the missiles—the interlocuters remain unseen. The few times we see human figures they almost never appear in close-up and are instead shot from a cool distance. There is instead a prevalence for landscapes, signage and townscapes which provides the foundation for the voices of young people speaking about indoctrination in the education system, soldiers discussing the concrete reality of the base, and military wives’ reflections on their methods of compartmentalization in order to forget about the destruction of these bombs.

The formal tension the filmmakers exploit between voice and image, between presence and absence acutely mirror the ironic tensions of the base itself. This is a space, after all, where potentially catastrophic nuclear weapons must be present enough to act as an international deterrent, while also hidden and rendered invisible for the sake of the local population. There is at once a need to “project nuclear threat to preserve peace” while at the same time there is a need for the missiles’ presence to remain accepted but unspoken.

While a film—and a place—grounded in Cold War ideology and history, Minot, North Dakota updates these elements to its then-present and continues to resonate to the future.