Dark Fibres

Dark Fibres begins with the story of Hayastan Shakarian, an elderly woman from a Georgian village who, while collecting scrap metal in 2011, allegedly cut through a fibre-optic cable and plunged the region into an internet crisis. Rogalska uses this incident to probe the invisible though fragile digital infrastructure and the attendant inequalities. Images of fibre-optic production weave together with Chakrulo, a medieval song about peasants on the brink of revolt against a feudal lord. The result is a film about contemporary exploitation, global systems and the social tensions running through the cables of the connected world.