“Funny how you can get so convinced of your own greatness, that you think it’s going to last forever.  Then all that’s left of you is memory, then ruins, then nothing.”

Nightlands is a dislocated environmental thriller which takes place in the extraordinary ex-Soviet ghost town of Pyramiden on the Svalbard Archipelago during a ferocious Arctic winter.  

Set in 1999 in the twilight of a decade of capitalist chaos in Russia and the dawn of the Putin autocracy, the ghost town’s caretakers, an old man and a young woman, play out a generational conflict.  Slava and Sasha are antagonistic representatives of opposing world views, he nostalgic for the collapsed communist past, she embracing the possibilities of the new world order.  

But as the Polar Night and its storms close in on them, they are forced to acknowledge both their need for and their rejection of each other.  Set in an environment of mighty natural forces, Nightlands is a powerful metaphor for how authoritarians weaponise nostalgia.