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By Meghna Gupta

Resilience can be entirely bewildering.  In the remote steppes of Semiplatinsk, Kazakhstan, not only do people continue to live in cruelly icy weather and austerely bare surroundings, but they are also the residents and victims of a Soviet ex-nuclear test site. The panicky tick of a Geiger meter picking up radioactivity levels frequently cuts through the soundtrack as local farmers are unable to leave their houses without one.

Four generations on, deformed children are still being born to descendants of the original nuclear victims. The Kazakh state medical department has a desperate solution: to force all genetically mutated mothers to abort. I prepared myself and my sympathies for a morally one-sided story of ethnic cleansing with irredeemable overtones of Nazi-style eugenics. What I didn’t expect was to experience a very slight but nevertheless significant confusion about the universally inviolable human right - giving birth. 

Dr. Nurmagambetov, by my calculations, was bound to be a grotesque cartoon. However, this intriguing head of the state Maternity Department shifts erratically from callous and cold to desperate and outraged. One minute, he contemptuously addresses genetically mutated fetuses in glass jars as monsters and Cyclops. The next, it’s impossible to escape his heartbreak in a children’s home where parents have given up children with deformities too drastic to care for themselves. Not satisfied with this level of human complexity, director Anthony Butt brings us Bibigul, the determined and pregnant child of a nuclear victim. Bibigul is alert, beautiful despite her deformities, stigmatized and driven underground. She leads a life normal enough to clearly challenge the maternity department’s grim and uniform prognosis for nuclear victims. Her resolute intention to give birth, and belief in her child, exposes the oversimplistic nature of extreme solutions.

Butt is less successful in his attempt to ask the Soviet nuclear scientists responsible why they endorsed the tests, knowing that people would be harmed. It distracts from the narrative -  a red herring which promises a twist in the plot. It fails to deliver as he abruptly stops short of probing deeply enough. However, the film’s courage cannot be disputed. It does not shy away from the Nazi spectre that looms over it. Nurmagambetov openly compares his medical thought directly to Hitler’s methods, giving way to a moral maze more complicated than an Escher drawing.

Outside of the fog of morality that this film is shrouded in, it is also about an extreme level of resilience, resistance and continuity. Bibigul, her risky pregnancy and the other residents of radioactive test site made me wonder why people who live in such hard conditions stay, doggedly looking adversity in the face.

Dir: Anthony Butt

Dur: 65 mins

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