Greetings from Green Bank – the small town where modern technology is banned

Although the condition is not widely recognised by scientists, people who believe they’re affected by electromagnetic hypersensitivity attribute a wide range of symptoms to the ever-growing number of electromagnetic fields hidden in everyday life. In the United States, some have grown so troubled by health problems they attribute to electromagnetic fields that they’ve relocated to the small town of Green Bank, West Virginia, where, due to the presence of a nearby radio telescope, almost every electromagnetic emission – and, by extension, cell phones, wifi networks and radio transmissions – has been banned since the 1950s. This fragment from the feature-length documentary Green Bank Pastoral (2020) from the UK-based Colombian filmmaker Federico Urdaneta explores how the lives of longtime Green Bank locals, scientists and these ‘wifi refugees’ intersect in this town of less than 100.