The Russian Woodpecker, which won best documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015, premiered at the Zhovten cinema in Kyiv on Jan. 28.
The film
tells the story of artist Fedor Alexandrovich who, at the age of four, was
evacuated from the city of Prypyat after the Chornobyl nuclear power plant
explosion in 1986. Later in life, Alexandrovich heard about the existence of a
giant, over-the-horizon radar system not far from the nuclear plant, known as
the Woodpecker, and became obsessed with the idea that it had something to do
with the nuclear tragedy.
Whether or
not one agrees with the Alexandrovich’s final theory, the film reignites the
very important debate about the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe. It
highlights the fact that the archives detailing who gave the order for the
experiment that caused reactor No. 4 at the plant to explode are still
classified, that details of trial of the main engineer – who was sentenced to
10 years in prison – are also still classified; and finally, the fact that the
Soviet authorities allowed Prypyat residents to continue to live in
life-threatening levels of radiation for 36 hours, and then took two weeks to
fully evacuate the city that had 50,000 people. The scale of the health
consequences are still unknown.
But the
film is not really about Chornobyl, as its U.S. director Chad Gracia pointed
out in a question and answer session after the screening. Rather, it is about
an eccentric artist trying to understand key events in Ukraine’s history: the
Holodomor famine, Chornobyl and Euromaidan.
Alexandrovich’s
conclusion is this: the Soviet system was evil, Russian President Vladimir
Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union, and that there is still a group of
people that pervade Ukraine’s society and share that same Soviet mentality.
These, he believes, include the Chornobyl officials who refuse to divulge
information almost 30 years after the incident, and former Ukrainian presidents
– such as the ousted Viktor Yanukovych – who maintained the repressive,
Soviet-style surveillance state.
Ironically,
the film was criticized by some at the premiere for “insulting the workers of
Prypyat” – a very Soviet response to an extremely thought provoking and
enlivening film, which was created to break that very way of thinking and
reattribute some responsibility. This is not to say that the workers of
Chornobyl were responsible for the tragedy – according to Fedor’s theory, if
anything, they were the victims. Fedor is simply asking why, 29 years later, we
still do not know for certain what happened.
(Official trailer of The Russian Woodpecker)
Kyiv Post staff
writer Isobel Koshiw can be reached at [email protected]
