Timely film on Chernobyl shocks audience

By Millicent Caffrey

Hailing from Newtown, Sydney, Merilyn Fairskye has taken her dynamic films, video installations and photo based works from Bangkok to Mexico. It was the premiere of Precarious, however, that sent a collective shiver down the spines of a Broadway audience on 18th March.

The documentary shows the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernoybl which left an estimated 985,000 dead as a result of the radioactivity released. Twenty five years after the explosion at Reactor Number Four near the tiny Ukranian town of Pripyat, Fairskye depicts a landscape of terminally damaged power plant structures sunk in a long, heavy winter.

“I drove into Chernobyl past houses still contaminated by radiation, and further along, more toxic houses buried under a thick layer of clay. Surrounded by thick snow and heavy silence, (being there) felt like after the end of the world. Precarious started to take shape then,” said Fairskye.

The artist described the simple stoicism and resilience of those she interviewed during the making of Precarious.

“The story of Iuri Ursul, who was a young helicopter pilot at the time of the accident. He was one of the liquidators who had to work at Chernobyl immediately after the accident. He spoke of a sense of duty that compelled many of the young guys to comply with the directions to go into Chernoybl, with little protection, many of whom are now dead, their lives shortened by the exposure to radiation.”

Themes of radiation contamination bear frightening similarities to recent news coverage of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan’s Fukushima power plant, leaving up to 9,000 dead with 12,272 still officially listed as missing, according to Japanese police.

Fairskye sees many parallels with Precarious and the Japanese experience.

“More and more information that’s coming out points to human folly.  And, as with Chernobyl, the catastrophic danger is being downplayed and local people are not being told the full story,” said Ms Fairskye.

“I was shocked as the events unfolded in Japan,” said Ms Fairskye. “It all seemed horribly familiar.”