Day Three - Sunday (March 9)

Heavy Water: A Film for Chernobyl

Director: Phil Grabsky & David Bickerstaff

United Kingdom/2006/52 min/English, Ukrainian with English subtitles

The Chernobyl disaster remains mankind’s worst nuclear accident, with over 600,000 people directly affected in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and potentially millions more across the world. That reactor in Unit 4 exploded during the night of April 26, 1986, because of an ill-conceived test of the emergency shutdown system is well-known; even the authorities' attempts to cover up the magnitude of the disaster is common knowledge. What this film (based on Mario Petrucci’s book-length poem) does, then, is focus on those that have largely been forgotten, except by their families – the conscripted “heroes”, the pilots, fire-fighters, soldiers, collectively called “liquidators. All the more ironic, given that the liquidators were themselves liquidated by their short but usually lethal exposure to the horrific levels of radiation spewing from the burning, melting wreck of the reactor core. Pripyat, the deserted power plant town as seen both before the disaster and twenty years later, and archival footage of the liquidators doing their work, are the visual background for the poem as narrative.

Looking for an Icon

Director: Hans Pool & Maaik Krijgsman

Netherlands/2005/55 min/English

How does the World Press Photo Foundation choose its Photo of the Year? How does a photograph become an icon – a truth that evolves and often diverges from the historical fact that it purported to capture? Four famous photos are examined and discussed, by the people who took them, judges for the World Press Photo agency, and various photography critics and theorists, among them, Oliviero Toscani, the photographer/designer famous for the Benneton “Colors” ad campaign. Eddie Adams’s 1968 photo of a Viet Cong prisoner’s public execution, an anonymous photograph of Salvador Allende’s final moments during the 1973 Chilean coup that took his life, Charlie Cole’s 1989 Tiananmen Square photo of a student blocking a row of tanks, and David Tunley’s 1981 Persian Gulf War photo of an emotionally overcome soldier in a helicopter. Oliviero has some particularly insightful comments that furthers the icon hypothesis from the Western Judeo-Christian anchor that most of us bring to our interpretation of what we see in a photograph, with an articulate and funny, but embarrassingly candid observation on the nature of guilt and sin.