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Reviews
The Goldfinch (2019)
Chained Happiness
I loved this. I don't think such low rating is justified. I could feel quite well the diversity of the personalities in the movie whether it'd be Theo himself or Boris, his friend, or, for example, Xandra (Sarah Paulsen). I know it's an adaptation, and I am still to read the Donna Tartt's book. The goldfinch, a bird, symbolizes abundance, happiness and joy. And Theo did feel happy just preserving the 17th-century painting of a chained goldfinch (what a metaphor!!) that he'd happened to rescue during the explosion at the MOMA. Also, the idea that sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well that matters; or rather the idea that to achieve something big, something great or important, you might do something bad, was not at all new to me but, in this context, it did strike my mind.
Children of the Snow Land (2018)
"I must be cruel only to be kind."
'Children of the Snow Land' is a very moving feature documentary about three teenagers Nima, Tsering Deki and Jeewan who, aged 4-6 years old, were brought from practically inaccessible, very poor, villages in the Himalayas in Nepal to a boarding school 'Snow Land' in Kathmandu (run by a Buddhist monk and funded by charity) by their relatives and were left there alone without anybody from their families ever visiting them. All just for the sake of education and a better, than their own, future for these children.
Now that they are about to graduate they have a lucky chance to go back to their villages and visit their families for three months. They feel very excited but also a little insecure about their journeys back home. It takes them a 14-hour bus ride, a flight and a half a week to two weeks (the children live in different parts of the Himalayan region) of a dangerous climb, for some of them in freezing temperatures with the risk of avalanches, and of course, reconnecting with their families and communities, and a lot of reflection on the reasons of their abandonment to understand why their parents had to be cruel. Only to be kind.
The film crew provided these three students with video gear and training - they turned out to be great at filming and video storytelling, and, as a result, we are awarded with some stunning landscape views from some of the remotest and hardest-to-reach places in the Himalayan mountains that we will never be able to visit ourselves.
I loved all the story lines in the film, but my favorite one is probably that of lovely Tsering. It seems for her mother it was a very hard decision to send her away when she was still a toddler, but looking at the hard life of a woman in such places where men (judging from Tsering's father's film appearance) drink tea and talk with their buddies all day, and watch TV in the evenings, I can totally understand the sacrifice her mother chose to make.
I loved this doc. I watched it with my children, and they were equally moved by these children's life stories.
The film won Best Documentary awards at film festivals in LA (2018) and Canada (2019).
Chernobyl (2019)
The Black True Tale
I am from Minsk, Belarus, same as Ulana Khomyuk from the Chernobyl series. At the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe I was eleven, a fifth-grader at school. One day at the end of April, or it might be early May, I came back home after classes and saw my mother, who was a radiologist, talking on the phone to somebody very gravely. As soon as I opened the door with my key on a strap that we used to wear around necks, and stepped in, my mother asked me covering the telephone reciever with one hand if it was raining outside. I said it was drizzling a bit in the morning. She told me to immediately go and wash my hair, and so I did. Then she poured milk into a mug, added three drops of iodine and said that I had to drink that. I remember asking her if iodine was edible, and she just said that's what she was instructed to do by a friend. I drank it. Still my mum couldn't explain anything clearly, so I felt quite unaware of what was happening for quite a long time unti bits and pieces of what had happened started to unwrap after the collapse of the USSR.
When I got older I read Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl/Chernobyl Prayer. It was a very hard and slow read as the stories told were horrifying. And now this series, four episodes of which I binge-watched yesterday, took me back to the eighties in the Soviet Belarus. I recognize everything in this half-docu, although I've never been to Pripyat. My mom is originally from a small town on the Dnieper - the mouth of the Pripyat river - in the Gomel region in the south of Belarus, and we used to visit it every year before the Chernobyl. Then we stopped, as we felt scared and cautious, and I went there again only when I was an adult. The series left me in tears. It all looks even more frightning than we could imagine. The course of events is being told quite clearly and accurately from what I've known. The actors look pretty Russian/Belarusian/Ukranian to me, and all the locations - from the regional hospitals and the nuclear plant interior to Minsk and Moscow administrative buildings and science institutions look very authentic and detectable. Ulana Khomyuk migh be a fictional character, but there was indeed such a character - Vassili Nesterenko, a Soviet and Belorusian physicist and a former director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (1977-1987) who informed the first secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus Nikolai Slunkov (whose BD is on April 26 by coincidence) that the dosimeters showed the elevated dose of ionizing radiation. Nesterenko also was one of the liquidators of the Chernobyl accident anc the aftermath - he threw liquid nitrogen containers from a helicopter on the burning reactor core. To do this he had to move into the middle of radioactive smoke. Despite the heavy radioactive contamination of the area, Vassili Nesterenko survived (he died in 2008). However, three out of the four passengers of his helicopter died from radioactive irradiation and contamination.
And one more fact: the literal translation of Chernobyl (Chernaya Byl) is The Black True Tale.