Directed by Chad Gracia | Ukraine/UK/USA | English & Russian w/ English subtitles | 2015 | Documentary | 80 mins
Grand Jury Prize World Documentary, Sundance
Sponsor: Duncan Wisniewski Architecture
Film Source: Roast Beef Productions
“It’s not the Russia we used to know. It’s the Soviet Union again,” Fedor Alexandrovich states in Chad Gracia’s The Russian Woodpecker, an enlightening and boldly realized documentary which is part conspiracy theory, part sobering history lesson, part microcosm of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The film’s primary subject is the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which remains the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. Alexandrovich, a Chernobyl native who grew up in the wake of the disaster, serves as the film’s wild-eyed, bushy-haired investigative reporter who believes that the nuclear catastrophe was a cover-up job linked to the Soviets’ monstrous Duga radar system, which allegedly attempted to infiltrate American intelligence communications during the waning days of the Cold War. Gracia’s film – in thrilling fashion – uncovers a possible culprit in the Chernobyl tragedy, but perhaps its bolder suggestion is that the scars of Chernobyl and the Soviet-era police state continue to resonate in last year’s Russian military intervention in the Ukraine.