Land of Oblivion (La Terre Outragée)(湮沒之地)

Everyone has heard of Chernobyl, the way they have heard of Hiroshima. Whilst the latter is a name associated with the atom bomb which put an abrupt end to tiny Japan's imperrialist war in fulfilment of its dream of becoming the shining light of Asia, as the highest realization of its ancient samurai spirit, the former is about the horrors of careless use of nuclear energy in peacetime, supposed to be another shining example of the superiority of the  Soviet socialism in action. Did anybody pay any attention to what Chernobyl really means to the lives of its former inhabitants?

The often ignored "human cost" of technological progress is explored by Michale Boganim's first feature film "Land of Oblivion (La Terre Outragée) which traces the lives of three of the inhabitants of a little model Socialist town Pripiat, within three miles of Chernobyl where the catastrophic nuclear leak on April 29, 1986,  about a quarter of a century ago, first had the name of this hitherto unknown town brought to our attention in newspaper headlines across the world: a farmer, a boy who planted an apple tree on a wood  close to his home in the same area as the nuclear plant and a tourist guide. 

As the film opens, we see a beautiful girl Anya (Olga Kurylenko), looking up at the clear blue sky on a summer day comfortably lying on the lap of her young lover Piotr (Nikita Emshanov), on a rowing boat flowing gently down a river.  In the background is the silhouette of the notorious nuclear plant. Off screen, we hear the sound the girl, speaking in French about her story. Next we see a group of villagers fishing on the same river and chit chatting about the coming arrival of elcctricity from several power plants now being built.

Then we see a group of villagers, all dressed up, taking a wedding photo under the statue of Lenin at the town square. From a loudspeaker under the statue, we hear an announcement that there will be a festival to celebrate Labour Day on lst May, when  there will be a fun fair, music and dance and food aplenty and a poetry competition which will be attended by the second party secretary of the Soviet Communist Party . But then, suddenly there was a shower and everybody scrambled for cover. The rain soon stopped and the wedding festivities continued nearby under a tent in the open air. The people drank, sang and danced to the tune of an accordion. In the background, we see a number of fishes with their bellies up on the surface of the river. The wedding crowd did not pay any attention. Then, there was another shower and the people had to seek cover again in a nearby house. Inside a hut, we find the lovers kissing.  We hear a phone ring and the bridegroom, who is a fireman, had been summoned to go fight a fire. The bride begged him to stay. He said if he did, he would lose his job. Reluctantly she had to let him go. Her mother consoled the bride that on her own wedding day, her father went drinking with his buddies and whispered into her ears that  when he returned they had a wonderful time. The bride is Anya and the bridegroom Piotr. Piotr never returned.

Shortly thereafter, we see a military helicopter landing on a field with soldiers in protective plastic clothes spraying petrol on the farm houses there and burning them whilst other soldiers ordered the people to leave immediately  and not to take anything with them. They did not give any reason. Some suspected that it was war with America. Some of the farmers put up some resistance but in the end, all had to go into a coach. Anya and her family had to go too. We learn later that they are now living in a nearby town some 30 miles away.

Then the scene cuts to an engineer Alexei at his own house taking out a radiation dosimeter(which measures ionizing radiation) he has on his waist to measure the radioactivity outside his house. After receiving a telephone call from his senior, he told him that they must make a public announcement on the radio and TV, an idea which did not receive any favor. After that he begged and then ordered his wife and child to leave the house immediately and drive their family car to the house of their relative in the next town and in the meantime, he himself went to the local market to warn housewives and others there not to buy the meat which he found had been contaminated by radiation but the townsfolk, who did not know what was going on, treated him as if he were a fool and a mad man because on account of his position as a state official, he was bound by an oath of secrecy not to reveal the true cause of his warning. When he reached the exit of the market, it was starting to rain. He asked the middle aged lady selling foldable umbrellas hung against the wall there how much they cost. The woman replied 30 roubles each. He took all of them without a thought and then went out and gave them to whoever he saw in the streets to protect them from the radioactive rain. The enormity of his burden upon his conscience eventually proved too much and ironically, he actually went mad. Amongst the people he helped was Anya who was sleeping on a roadside bench a little distance from a hospital. She had just come out of the hospital from which she learned that her husband had been found with radioactivity level exceeding 1600 degrees and had been sent to Moscow. The nurse there at first refused to tell her but upon being told that the man she was looking for was her husband who left to answer a call to fight a fire on her wedding day, she relented in breach of the secrecy regulations.

This French-German and Polish co-production is done in quasi documentary form. We see Anya, a decade after the leak introducing the the town. now called "the Zone" , to French tourists in radioactive-proof gowns in a tourist bus, still unable to forget what happened that day. She was now in love with another former colleague of her husband and who had actually set about putting into practice his promise to build a new home in that town but she refused to marry him and although she had now also got a French boyfriend working on a local project who promised to take her to France and she agreed, yet at the last minute, she didn't go. Somehow, something inside her would make her return to Pripiat again and again although there is not much there except ruined buildings overgrown with weeds, abandoned factories and museums and devastated landscape. We also see how Valery, the son of of the engineer Alexei would despite her mother's express orders and despite the relevant Government safety bans, go back to the house of his childhood, spend time there, looking at old photographs, wearing clothes hung in the closet, and touching various objects in that house, playing a few notes on the abandoned piano and looking for that apple tree which he planted with his father, whom his family had taken to be dead, some 10 years ago. In the meantime, we see that engineer had become a "lunatic", always asking people in the railway stations what their names were, where they came from and putting everything into a notebook because somehow, he thought that important . He was always hitching rides on the trains passing through  Propiat which had long ceased to stop there.  We see also one of the farmers who stubbornly refused to leave his farm all through the years and is now growing apples for sale to tourists which the bride would still bring from time to time. The bride's own house nearby is now occupied by some immigrant squatters from other parts of Ukraine and when she went there she was told to get off at gunpoint.

It's a very strange film, made like a documentary and filmed on location and yet is not. There is a certain sensitivity to the feelings of what it portrays in well composed images often at long or medium shots. There is huge contrast in the images of the town "before" and "after": lyrical and full of life "before", cold, deserted and eerily desolate "after" and yet it still held a certain inexplicable fascination for some of the people who for one reason or another are still living there, including a little girl who would flit through the ruins and rubble singing children songs as if the place were a giant playground; the engineer's son Valery who returned to the place during the 10th anniversary commemorating the deaths of the villagers, brought there by his mother and their neighbors, the bride Anya who had not yet consummated her marriage and who was in a sense still looking forward to bringing a closure to that non-completed relationship, feeling an irresistible urge to return to the place again and again, albeit in the capacity of a tourist guide looking after French tourists and the stubborn farmer who refused to quit his farm. Through the mouth of Anya we learn the history of the place. As a local, there is an added authenticity in what she says which the tourists can feel. So can we. There is a love of the land which no amount official regulations and pragmatic considerations can ever touch. Perhaps there are two Pripiats: the Pripiat of reality and now officially proclaimed a quarantined and protected  radioactive "zone" which people can only enter with official papers and another Pripiat, that still living somewhere deep within the psyche of some of its former inhabitants in another realm of time which is beyond time. It's a film of loss, of stubborn hope and a celebration of the indomitable human will to somehow repossess its own history.