Essence of Nadya
Motohashi hooks best director award
By Tim Ryan
for documentary on plight of
displaced Chernobyl villagers
Star-BulletinTHE easiest and most obvious story about the effects of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl on a Russian village would be the devastation, the pollution, dislocated families and sadness of the innocent children.
But documentarian Seiichi Motohashi took the winding path rather than the direct one. After visiting Chernobyl in 1991 as a volunteer, he made 10 trips to the region over four years, and published two books of photo essays about the life there in general, and one about the children.
But Motohashi knew there was a story that needed to be told in film. Overcoming his own editorial prejudices and shock, he found the real story, Motohashi explained this week in an interview at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
"I was always looking at the situation from my point of view and felt sorry for the villagers (in the Republic of Belarus) because their land was contaminated, they were being forced to evacuate, their lives were being uprooted," he said through an interpreter. "But then I started seeing life through their point of view. They accepted what had happened. They loved their lives of simplicity. They needed nothing but their land. And no one felt sorry for themselves. The people of this village in the Chechesk region were happy.
"This would be the subject of my film."
So with a crew of 10 -- six Japanese, three Russians and one Belarusan -- Motohashi made the 118-minute "Nadya's Village" for $800,000 -- chronicling six families who decided to remain in the evacuated Dudichi Village. They lived with the families for a month at a time through a year of four seasons, filming the villagers' insurmountable will to survive in a hopelessly contaminated area that they will always consider home.
The film won the Hawaiian International Film Festival's Golden Maile Award for best documentary, announced last night during ceremonies at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
When the nuclear power station in Chernobyl exploded 12 years ago, the spilled radioactive pollution was pushed by strong winds throughout the neighboring Republic of Belarus, theoretically making it unlivable.
Most members of the 300 families in the village area were forced by the government to leave their homes. But six families refused to leave and were called "samosyol," selfish people.
Who is the Nadya of the film's title? She's a simple, waif-like 8-year-old girl from Dudichi village.
"The beauty of my film is the innocent laughter and joy of Nadya who represents the remain-ing villagers," Motohashi said.
Seiichi Motohashi:"I started
seeing life through their point of view. They
accepted what had happened. They loved
their lives of simplicity."
But there's also 82-year-old "Mr. Nabokin" from a nearby village, a school teacher turned farmer who works polluted land."This is my land," Nabokin tells the director. "Where am I supposed to go? Without land I have no life."
"Nadya's Village" is based on Motohashi's photo book "Infinite Embrace" which won the annual Japanese Professional Photographers award and the Shanshin no Kai Shou award.
"A picture is born only from relationship with life," says Motohashi. "I do not dwell on the tragedies but to elaborately show the lives of the villagers. The life within the beautiful scenery, which you can't believe is dying from pollution."
The year's filming has changed Motohashi's life.
"I used to be very much like other Japanese, quite materialistic," he explains. "But I learned that a simple lifestyle is what makes living valuable; it gives people purity and joy."
Though the people of "Nadya's Village" have no electricity or any modern conveniences, Moto-hashi insists that they are "the happiest people I have ever seen because they have each other."
The film has been exhibited at the Berlin, Vienna, Taipei and Tucson film festivals. Next week, Motohashi returns to the village where he shot the film to show it to its subjects. But the audience will be smaller.
Three of the remaining six families have left their and for a neighboring city to find work.
"This is the real tragedy," Motohashi says.
