Director: Iara Lee
Running time: 57mins
Film festivals cost a lot of money to run – and when the costs for venues, staffing, website hosting and marketing are squared off, many organisations struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees the only source of revenue that many festivals can rely on, that can make granting waivers difficult – resulting in filmmakers who already struggle to have their voices heard being further marginalised.
Stories told by artists from low-income backgrounds, opposition groups hit by censorship, or individuals in nations subjected to international sanctions still need a platform. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a fifth season.
Over the current run of matinees, IFL will showcase work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free communication of political and social issues. The fourth film in our latest run of Saturday Matinees comes from international journalist and activist Iara Lee, and explores the phenomenon of ‘urban exploration’ in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
The film taps into an increasingly prevalent theme in popular culture and beyond. So much of the post-apocalyptic iconography of late capitalism has led consumers to believe that the end of the world wouldn’t actually be so bad, because every one of us is supposedly the most rugged of individuals, surviving by our wits alone. When the asteroids hit, or the northern hemisphere freezes over, or the zombie uprising happens, many people have readily imagined what they and their friends would do, skirting around the fact illustrated by the 2020 pandemic that in the absence of meaningful state support, the only thing many of us will do in such a situation is die.
The wealthy and the powerful have long realised the potential revenue-stream this presents them with. Now, the disaster-sites they have had a hand in creating are not only something to be repurposed as a ‘post-apocalyptic’ cash-cow for tourism (regardless of the hazards they might still present), but this process also allows them to reaffirm a key message that we have nothing to worry about, these sites of catastrophe are something we could all take in our stride, so there’s no need to change anything in the society that creates them!
The most infamous example of this is the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It is unavoidably hazardous to be there for a sustained amount of time. But it’s also extremely profitable. So, the battle for the future of the area – including the abandoned city of Pripyat – has become a bun-fight between two equally embarrassing corporatist visions.
There has been an establishment move towards waving away safety fears, and making the Ukrainian city into a Disneyland of human tragedy. In the years leading up to the invasion of the Russian army, the city had become Ukraine’s hottest tourist destination, with 124,423 international guests in 2019 alone. That same year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed an executive order aiming to “[transform] the exclusion zone into one of the points of growth in new Ukraine.”
At the same time, there are a group of people who paint themselves as a ‘movement’ pushing back on that front, but are really just a different, less-regulated side of the same coin. Self-styled stalkers – illegal visitors who break into the exclusion zone to play at survival in its deserted structures – are bent on flouting the safety advice from officials to see all of the sites for themselves.
But whether the visitors are part of the hordes of mouth breathing, windbreaker-draped American tourists shuffling through the streets; or wiry wannabe militiamen playing make-believe in the woods while decked out in camo from the army surplus shop; the ultimate aim does not really vary that much. Obtain the same collection of distasteful selfies as all the other ‘rugged explorers’ in the area; indulge in a period of libertarian larping as you cosplay your very own Fallout game (even complete with pathetic warring ‘clans’, squabbling for natural resources and shelter in the world of the stalkers); before falling back to the cosy confines of modern life.
Iara Lee’s documentary Stalking Chernobyl: Exploration After Apocalypse does an excellent job of giving both sides of this inane coin enough rope to hang themselves with. First, there are the licensed tour-guides, who know very well which side their bread is buttered on, and so have no problem toeing the party line on the government’s safety advice, however absurd it is.
The Chernobyl exclusion area has to be both safe enough for visitors to fill the coffers of official tour companies, but also unsafe enough to create the kind of scarcity that means visitors only dare to attend via those official avenues. So, at one moment a tour guide will be glibly assuring the camera that “visitors encounter more radiation on the way to the city than the city itself”, but at another moment they will assert that because radioactive material still litters the houses of Pripyat, “if someone simply opens the wrong door, it could be disastrous for them”.
Like many conspiracy theorists, the stalkers, ‘urbex’ enthusiasts, and other annoyingly named groups of people breaking into the exclusion zone can smell the bullshit. They just have a proclivity to interpreting the lies in a way that is most enjoyable or convenient for their own biases. So, Lee’s camera finds no shortage of individuals willing to volunteer demonstrably insane opinions on radiation poisoning.
One suggests that “only people who are afraid of radiation die from it”, while another argues that he ventured into an alleged high-radiation zone six years ago, and is just fine – so the implication is that all those warnings about the danger must be a bunch of nonsense. And perhaps that’s an attitude that’s understandable, considering late in the film another tour-guide – again making the case it’s just great in the exclusion zone – argues that the ‘liquidators’ sent in to clean Chernobyl in the late 1980s were hardly impacted. Admittedly, many died – but he argues that many more of them died from “suicide” than the impacts of radiation because the “stress” of the USSR’s social and economic measures had compromised their physical and mental health first.
This is immediately trashed by eye-witness accounts Lee has managed to source. One, the daughter of a liquidator, recalls how her father ignored the pleas of her mother to give up the “dangerous work” because the pay was so good. But after four years, he finally exited the role, and spent the following six years battling an illness that eventually claimed his life. Another, a liquidator himself, recalls how officials routinely falsified the health records of both himself and his colleagues – and whitewashed the overexposure to radiation which was rampant among the cleaners.
It’s a brilliant moment of documentary-making, where Lee’s film comes closest to making a cohesive point about the zone; what it might mean for a world where governments and corporations are desperate to maintain the toxic system of power that has seen them live so well; and what it says about the consumers among us who are so preposterously happy to go along with that charade for social currency.
It might have been nice to hear more on this from the witnesses themselves. What does someone whose father died as an expendable “bio-robot” think of the people breaking into the exclusion zone and gleefully glossing over her experience, and starting campfires with radioactive wood, essentially making the toxins into an aerosol which can spread death for miles around? What does a surviving liquidator make of the industry which has sprung up around the suffering of his former colleagues, and which can only exist by trashing the legacy of their exploitation? I would love to know.
As this film was also created before the invasion of Russian troops in 2022, it would be interesting what Zelenskyy’s plans are for the zone now. Especially after Reuters reported that the Russian forces used the Red Forest as a route for their convoys, kicking up clouds of radioactive dust – apparently leading to multiple cases of radiation sickness and a death, and to the Russian troops to ultimately abandon the strategic position. If / when the war ends, is this still the kind of ‘attraction’ that should be at the heart of a “new Ukraine”? In a world which is still doing its very best to present itself as without need of genuine change, I suspect the answer will still end up being “yes”.
As always with Saturday Matinees, the film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 27th of July, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. You can give it your own score out of five there! As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE24 to access the film.