A documentary by Michael Madsen. In English, Swedish, and Finnish with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, May 27, at the Vancity Theatre

They say a diamond is forever, but if you really want to think long-term, consider giving your loved one enriched plutonium. Indeed, you must ponder incredible time scales to grasp the notions discussed in this curiously poetic paean to the storage of nuclear waste.

Right now, there's an excavation happening in Northern Finland, a repository of that country's spent nuclear materials. Called Onkalo (“hiding place” in Finnish), this underground warren of cement canisters buried in rock will take 100 years to complete; then it will be sealed for another 100,000 years or so.

Made before the Fukushima disaster, the short, dreamlike Into Eternity—which looks more like a science-fiction flick than a documentary at times—takes us deep within the bowels of this not-so-secret project and back up to the offices and laboratories of scientists, engineers, and government officials responsible for an undertaking that none will see completed in his or her lifetime.

Young Danish writer-director Michael Madsen (not the glowering actor of the same name) knows just how long he can speak in a black space before his match burns out. And he probes his sober-minded Scandinavian friends to answer questions they haven't really thought through.

The chief concern is warning future generations away from Onkalo. How can we be certain that the humans (or whatever) of AD 3000 will speak any of our current languages or even understand pictograms as we know them? Will they think it's a kind of buried treasure? In any case, this solution only deals with a tiny fraction of the waste already produced in one small place. Beyond that is the notion that people capable of devoting such massive resources and ingenuity to a project like this probably could, you know, come up with something safer than splitting the atom for fun and profit.

Watch the trailer for Into Eternity.