Documentary Film about America's Largest Superfund Site coming to Butte, Montana

Rainer Komers is a gifted German film maker who tells his story with images and sounds, without resorting to spoken narrative.

Milltown, Montana (2009), a 34-minute documentary film about the Superfund site extending from Butte to Missoula, will be shown at the Montana Tech Library Auditorium at 4 p.m. on Saturday, February 20th. Komers will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions afterward.

Milltown, Montana is a visual essay about a grand landscape that has been mistreated by man. With powerful visual language Komers documents a region that was once the largest mining area in the U.S. but now seems locked into a postindustrial standstill. The film is entered in the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival’s “Big Sky” competition category and has already won a festival prize in Europe.

“Rainer Komers is a particular filmmaker who tells stories about particular places in a particular way. He lets you experience the rhythm of the places and feel the specific flow of the time there. He does not tell you what to think, on the contrary - he lets you participate in the creation of the film. His language is not German, English or Russian, his language is cinema.” Miroslav Janek, filmmaker/Prague

Komers will also be showing a second film, Ma’rib: traces of stones (2008; 30 minutes), a documentary about a city in Yemen where the aquifer is being dewatered for modern agriculture and a power station with devastating consequences for the traditional culture and local farmers.”