In Focus - Film important one

The first time a film won both the Best in Saskatchewan award and the Best in Festival at the Yorkton Film Festival was in 2010, when Silent Bombs: All for the Motherland, took home both of the big prizes. Gerald Sperling’s documentary, about the damage done by Soviet testing of nuclear bombs in the Semipalatinsk Polygon in Eastern Kazakhstan, is relatively simple, interviewing victims, doctors, scientists and Russian officials about what they see happening in the region.

 With a mix of modern-day footage and stock footage from the decades of nuclear testing, it tries to get out of the way and present the facts of what happened. Conversations with villagers in the region, as they speak of the abnormally high level of disease, death and disability in their families begin the film, and it steadily becomes difficult to believe that there is another side to this story. The exhaustive research and interviews into the damage nuclear testing has done to the people in the region can start to feel numbing after awhile, just the images of deformed children, born with rare diseases that are unheard of in most of the world, effectively make the point. These people are not healthy.

While the film tries to avoid being obviously manipulative, right down to employing some deliberately flat narration, it is effective in establishing the Russians who were conducting the nuclear tests as the villains. Throughout, there are people theorizing that the villages surrounding the polygon were used to test the effects of radiation exposure on unknowing subjects. An interview with a former soldier, who has a distracting nervous tic which he blames on radiation exposure, is cross-cut with an interview with someone claiming many former soldiers disappeared and were wiped from the record after suffering from severe effects from the radiation.

The placement of an interview with a Russian official seals the deal when it comes to the country’s part as a villain in this story, as he declares that the Kazakh people are unhealthy because it’s not as nice there as it is in Canada. It is placed late in the film and after several interviews where people are agreeing with the idea that nuclear fallout is killing people in the country. Early on, it might not garner as much reaction, but by putting it near the end, the viewer experiences a visceral feeling of anger at the official, because we have seen the rest of it, and feel as though we know he’s lying. It’s an effective way to play the audience’s emotions.

Silent Bombs is important, effectively showing the damage of nuclear testing, though it can be hard to watch. It’s not a feel good picture, and even the scattered seeds of hope in the end - Kazakhstan went independent in 1991 largely due to people’s anger about nuclear testing, and is completely free of nuclear testing - are countered by the long-lasting effects of those tests. But then again, what good could possibly come from testing nuclear bombs?