Of Piramida
In The Ghost Of Piramida director Andreas Koefoed follows the Danish band Efterklang on their 9 day audio expedition to the ghost town Piramida on Spitsbergen, located just a thousand kilometers from the North Pole and home to more polar bears than people.
Accompanied by their taciturn and not visibly impressed Russian polar bear guard, the group goes on a treasure hunt in the empty buildings of the ghost town, while the narrator, the former Piramida-citizen Alexander, takes us back to a bygone era, when Piramida flourished and the immigrant Russian miners and their families lived in a Soviet parallel society far from the brutal reality of their homeland.
One is in equal measures amazed and fascinated by the ghost town of Piramida, which remains deserted as if it was a fictional setting of the time after World War III. The human beings are gone, but the minimalist concrete apartment blocks remain and bear witness to the life that was.
In old-style Russian, the social pleasures of the community in this communist mini utopia are praised while Efterklang’s collected sounds take shape and beautifully accompany the enchanting tale about the rise and fall of the town.
Efterklang collected over a thousand sound recordings for the album Piramida (4AD, Sep 2012) they later wrote and recorded in Berlin.
The music in the film incorporates some of the early sketches, as well as finished songs from the album.