Green Bank Pastoral - A Fragment
2023 · 10m · GB
Directed by Federico Urdaneta
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
In Green Bank, West Virginia—a small Appalachian town where wireless signals have been banned since the 1950s to protect the world’s largest radio telescope—a community of people claiming Electro Hypersensitivity (EHS) has sought refuge from the modern connected world. The film observes their lives in this technological sanctuary with a quiet, elliptical gaze.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Appalachian EHS refugees living next to the world's largest radio telescope is one of the great accidental sci-fi premises Earth has handed us. A 10-minute fragment carved out of a feature is suspicious, but the setting cashes the check.
Urdaneta extracting a self-contained tone poem from his IDFA feature is an interesting structural move, and Green Bank is reliably fertile material — Sweetgrass-adjacent observational rigor applied to electro-hypersensitives. The fragment-of-feature framing is what intrigues me most.
A 10-minute fragment carved from a 53-minute IDFA feature, working as a tone poem about people fleeing wireless signals while living next to the largest radio telescope on Earth — the irony is structural, not editorial. Observational restraint is the right register here.
Reviews
Through its elliptical, fragmented storytelling, Green Bank Pastoral – A Fragment creates a scenic tone poem in the non-fiction realm, which is hard to achieve, yet even more enticing if it succeeds.
One of the most appealing aspects about Green Bank Pastoral – A Fragment is that it takes its protagonists seriously, without judging them.