Undescribable Perfection

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Don't Believe the Hype

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The Chernobyl reactor itself is seen briefly, and from a distance, to give you an idea of what this documentary is about. Some senior citizens living in the area are interviewed, and the rest of the time is spent in orphanages and hospitals in nearby Belarus, as radiation seems to take the greatest toll on growing or developing bodies. In line with another HBO documentary I've seen, Hacking Democracy, Chernobyl Heart does not have the production values of a HBO television series.If you are easily disturbed by seeing deformities from radiation then it might be better to give this a miss, but even so it shows the disaster that has befallen Belarus (of which Chernobyl borders), which does not have enough funding of its healthcare system to handle all the victims. "Chernobyl Heart" is the name for a hole in the heart condition and the crew visit an American surgeon who repairs this condition with a $300 heart valve patch which Belarus can only afford a limited number of.

Chernobyl was a tragic event, caused by human error, and a very poor design (The reactors had no containment buildings, just 1 major example!). Not mentioned in the movie, how much pollution is really there. There are many more pollutants than just radioactive materials, all much more mutanogenic than the radioactive ones. Moreover, the narrator just cites the nuclear disaster as the cause. This is at a time when nuclear power is necessary to our economy.The birth defects shown are horrific and tragic, and all very heart wrenching, but truly how many children are effected? There are 1,000's of birth defects in the US and other countries, all can be attributed to causes other than nuclear radiation. Ever hear of the "March of Dimes"?As for the scene when she holds up the Geiger counter, and says how scarred she is, either by a lie or incompetence, she is using it inaccurately. The selector switch is on Total Count, not on a count by minute (CPM rate), as it should be. Is the total count on over 1 minute, five minutes, several hours, several days? The "clicks" registered do not match up with the count displayed either. It appears to me that it is at maybe a couple of hundred counts per minute, not 13,000 counts every single minute (The LED would look steady at that rate!). Yes there is radiation levels higher than average world background, but there are beaches in France and India, Ramsar Iran, and other places that have very high background counts, and there are relatively few incidences of cancer and birth defects. Are children with birth defects a good charity? Of course! But one should not lie, by omission or ignorance about it to collect funds.

This film is certainly a testament to the power of images. I defy anyone to watch this and not feel the pain of the children featured. Sadly, though, its shock value is not matched by actually bothering to substantiate its case.The use of those tragically deformed children may have great emotional impact, but the documentary didn't bother to actually provide any evidence that their deformities were the fault of Chernobyl. That's because there isn't any, or for that matter any evidence that the level of birth defects has gone up in affected regions (with the exception of babies of pregnant women who actually worked on the cleanup at the time). A further claim was that the infant mortality rate was "three times that of the rest of Europe". This is true, as far as it goes. But the IMR is no higher than Belarus's post-soviet neighbors, and can be explained by the declining standard of living and quality of medical facilities.I could go on, but just about every other claim made in the documentary is either misleading, strongly disputed in the scientific literature (I made the effort to check after watching the documentary), or plain bogus.If you're a film student, this film is indeed technically brilliant. But it's based on a complete and utter distortion of the real picture.

It says a lot for the ignorance of mainstream film culture that this Academy Award Winning Doc Short has generated only three user comments on IMDb and zero external comments. Has anybody seen this film?It is also bothersome in a way that the film is in HBO distribution because of the context of exploitative fare HBO deals in---all the sex documentaries Sheila Nevins puts out. And then this, sandwiched in-between.The imagery is beyond exploitative; it so far over the line and yet obviously true. You could find these birth defects almost everywhere in the world but only in isolation. Here, they are in terrible concentration and the kids are suffering in terrible conditions in terrible state hospitals, mental wards and orphanages. All you Ronald Reagan boosting Americans who think 'freedom' won the day, 'won' the Cold War, look at what you have reduced Russia and its sister states to, just look at this and think what massive Lies you grew up under in the 1970's and 1980's and what they have brought about and become.The next Chernobyl might be caused by internal terrorism in the US, but it will likely be, as the film says, Chernobyl itself. 97% of the radiation is still concentrated there, says the film.If I seem angry it is from watching the film, the fallout, pardon the ugly metaphor, from the film. Why this is not a full-length film I do not understand. Why are their no officials interviewed, why is there no government response and responsibility? Why is no one from the UN interviewed? Why is the scope so small? Because the film telescopes to discuss the living conditions and medical defects only, it is 40 minutes of nothing but suffering and the small attempts to curtail it, to fix one problem, the 'Chernobyl Heart' defect that seems so tiny a victory in its symbolism.It is one of the hardest and most necessary pieces of film I've ever watched. But the content is far too important to be compressed into such a painful frame, so stripped of context.Think of how much the world could change if all the major TV networks in the world agreed to show this in prime time, simultaneously, without commercials.When I was growing up in the hippiefied 70's, all the grade seven kids in my school were made to watch "Do You Love This Planet?". (Somehow, I don't think it was on the curriculum.) The most lasting, and sensible, propaganda experiment of my childhood. It stuck. There is no reason for this film not be similarly shown.