A Moon of Nickel and Ice

A MOON OF NICKEL AND ICE                           B        

Canada (110) 2017  d:  François Jacob          

Winters are long and cold in Norilsk, Russia, with an average temperature of minus 31 degrees Celsius (minus 23 degrees F) in January. Days are characterized by frost, coupled with strong and violent winds. The cold period extends for about 280 days per year, with more than 130 days of snowstorms.

—The Weather Channel

From Québécois filmmaker François Jacob, totally familiar with living in the frozen north of Canada, he takes us on a journey to an unfathomable region of the earth, so far away from civilization that it’s only approachable by airplane, located 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where you’ll find Norilsk, Siberia, the northernmost city on earth with a population of more than 100,000 residents, with an average annual temperature of 14 degrees, and the distance to Krasnoyarsk, the capital of the region, is 1,500 km (932 miles), while the distance to the North Pole – 2,400 km (1491 miles).  What makes this area notable?  It holds the world’s largest deposits of nickel and palladium, with 17% and 41% of the world production respectively, while factory and mining operations continue non-stop 24 hrs/day, with a schedule of 3 work days followed by a day off.  But the underlying story is the city history, as it was built by Gulag prison camps dating back to 1935 that lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, though the prisons were also filled with regular criminals as well, which didn’t shut down until several years later.  All the more remarkable is that Gulag prisoners were also the architects that built the town, constructed in 1940, using cement block buildings in the style of Stalin architecture.  Without modern machinery and equipment, the brutal work was done by hand, brick by brick.  A second construction phase began in 1960 as part of the widespread USSR system of constructing buildings with pre-built panels, though they ran out of money and were never completed, but remain standing, a forgotten ghost town still part of the frozen landscape, relics from another era.  Currently, two oligarchs own the Norilsk Nickel Company, which is highly profitable, bringing in 2% of the Russian GDP, but the town is also listed among the top ten most polluted cities in the world today, annually spewing more than two million tons of pollutant gas (mainly sulphur dioxide, but also nitrogen oxides, carbon and phenols) into the atmosphere, where life expectancy is ten years less than the rest of Russia, which is already among the lowest anywhere in the world.  The risk of cancer is twice as high, including blood and skin disorders, while lung diseases are widespread, where the air quality is responsible for 37% of child deaths and 21% of adult deaths.  One could safely argue that Norilsk is the ugliest and the most inhospitable city anywhere on earth, yet ironically, on top of one of the tallest buildings is an electronic display on automatic repeat that reads “Norilsk Nickel:  A World of Opportunities!”

Resembling a science fiction landscape, the city, even today, remains a closed city (since 2001), as you need permits just to visit, with the filmmakers spending 5 years of grant writing, research, even learning the language while attempting to navigate the Russian bureaucracy, as all outsiders are brought in exclusively to work for the company.  While the place is covered in ice and snow for 8 or 9 months of the year, without a single living tree within 30 miles, so most of the time is spent indoors, including all children activities, where huge buildings allow them to enjoy typical outdoor activities like cycling and running in an indoor environment.  From December to January, there are six weeks when they are plunged into total darkness, with no sun whatsoever, causing any number of ailments, most stemming from depression, but also including insomnia, described as “the polar night syndrome.”  During the coldest periods, a convoy of 15 to 20 buses transport workers around three times a day, so if one bus breaks down, the passengers can be evacuated to another bus.  Too much time, however, spent living in confined spaces leads to claustrophobia, where the Russian antidote appears to be drinking heavily among friends, the favorite past time of most adult men.  Citizens here brag about their neighborly hospitality, claiming no child goes hungry, that they all look after one another and help in times of need, with drinking buddies claiming these are the best friends in the world, seen taking a midnight dip in the icy waters, with steam coming off their bodies as they exit.  Even in the bleakest environment, human friendship and companionship becomes paramount, as difficulties seem to unite people, showing how humans adapt and survive.  But it’s hard to escape the history of this town.  During the Stalin purges, some of the brightest minds were sent here as political prisoners, as many as 650,000, forced to work in the freezing cold under the most inhumane conditions imaginable, actually constructing the mines, factories, and buildings that still exist today, where 250,000 died prematurely from starvation and untreated sickness associated with slave labor.  Nickel ore is smelted on site at Norilsk, one of the most toxic pollutants, causing acid rain and smog, where a dark cloud constantly hovers over this city which is constantly spewing gaseous soot into the air, where even today the city is denounced by environmentalists as a major environmental disaster.  While in the West, we are free to mention the dark history and the toxic consequences of working there, but in Russia this information remains suppressed, as the Nickel company continues to recruit potential workers from former Soviet countries like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, so the advertising accentuates the financial rewards, including early retirement by age 45, but omits the hazards, though inhabitants living in Norilsk certainly understand the risks, that the company literally works you to death. 

There is some controversy among the residents of Norilsk about how to view their own history, whether to honor those that built this town and consider them heroes, or whether to remain silent about the uglier side of the Stalinist Gulags, preferring a sanitized account of history, which seems to be the government’s position, thinking it’s enough to mention what happened, but don’t dwell upon it.  Be done with it and move on.  There is a contingency that are sons and daughters of the Gulag prisoners that want to honor their ancestors, as they were committed Bolsheviks when communism was still considered a revolutionary worker’s party, where a giant statue of Lenin remains affixed to the town square.  Some are in disbelief that Russia lost so many lives in WWII to rid the world of fascism, yet it seems to be on the rise again, even in their own country, while the workers we see continue to vote a straight party line ticket, as communism represents their social values.  One of the leading advocates is highly outspoken, “Norilsk Nickel has erased its brutal history from the collective memory:  the exploitation of free labor.  They replaced the troubling slave history with myths of the Communist Youth and stories about eager newcomers.”  While once condemning Stalin, more recently Putin has embraced the former leader, including his dictatorial style, where a recent Russian poll by the Levada Center, an independent, non-governmental research organization, found Stalin to be more popular with Russians today than Putin, as after all, Stalin won the war, Stalin More Popular Than Putin, Russians Say - Newsweek.  With that strongman ideology comes a crackdown on free speech.  When a group attempted to raise a flag in honor of the town’s founders, commemorating a famous 1953 Gulag uprising, they were promptly arrested.  There is a thriving theater company that puts on dramatic performances, even in the dead of winter, claiming residents fully support them and come out, even during the worst blizzards.  What we never see are hockey players or figure skaters on ice rinks, where you’d think in this city they might thrive, but the cost of maintaining an “artificial” ice surface may seem superfluous in this ice city, where the outdoor conditions are simply too brutal.  As the film moves to questioning the ambitions of the city’s youth, almost unanimously these kids want out, as no one wants to stay here, believing it is a death trap.  Most envision careers in St. Petersburg, including a young girl who wrote her first novel at age 14, causing considerable alarm to local residents due to the adult content, believing she was too young to understand these matters. “Here it feels like living on the moon,” she says, describing life in Norilsk as living in an “endless tunnel.”  Nonetheless, she is bright and ambitious, where a film crew actually follows her as she travels to St. Petersburg and begins a new life, relieved to finally find herself in a cosmopolitan city teeming with life, with Norilsk, already a distant memory, viewed in stark contrast.  

East-West (Est-Ouest)

EAST-WEST (Est-Ouest)           A-                

France  Russia  Ukraine  Bulgaria  Spain  (124 mi)  1999  d:  Régis Wargnier

The second half of the 20th century saw unprecedented horror from the Nazi propagated Holocaust during World War II, one of the worst atrocities in history by attempting to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds, systematically singling out only Jewish people to exterminate.  But most historians agree that Josef Stalin likely killed more people than Hitler, where tens of millions were sent to the endless wastes of the Siberian Gulag.  But even Stalin doesn’t hold the distinction of being the most genocidal leader of the 20th century, as that would be Mao Zedong of China, who is thought to be responsible for the deaths of over 40 million people, most attributable to famine, forced labor, starvation, and execution.  Having said that, what’s unique to this film is tackling a subject rarely dealt with in the history books, namely the fate of thousands of Russians who fled the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution, who were lured back in the summer of 1946 by Stalin’s offer of an amnesty where they were supposedly needed in the reconstruction of a nation decimated by war.  Returning émigrés Alexei (Oleg Menchikov), a Russian trained doctor who had been living in France decides to return to help his homeland accompanied by his French wife Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and their 7-year old son.  Far from the glorious return to a welcoming country they expected, they were instead greeted by a harsh military force and separated into two lines, death or imprisonment, where most were executed as “imperialist spies.”  Only the professionals, whose skills are needed, are allowed to remain alive, where the Soviets are suspicious of all these new arrivals, treating them with open suspicion and hostility, stripping Marie of her French passport, where their activities are carefully monitored by the KGB and local communist citizens who threaten at any time to turn them in to authorities.  Wargnier, a French screenwriter and filmmaker, Louis Gardel, a French novelist and screenwriter born in Algiers, Sergei Bodrov, a Russian screenwriter and director (who son plays a major role in the film), and Rustam Ibragimbekov, a Russian, Azerbaijani screenwriter and playwright, go to considerable lengths to recreate the realities for ordinary people in the post-war Stalinist system. 

Told with a Spielberg, Hollywood epic sweep, France's entry for this year's Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film, you’d think this would fall into the melodramatic, over-the-top category, seemingly modeled on the war-time romance of DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), and while there are a bit too many Russians who also conveniently happen to speak French, the romance is actually submerged into the historical reality, as the film doesn’t overplay the emotions and takes a surprising interest in the individual lives affected and in developing character, where the acting throughout is superb, as is the production design, where the choice of locations can be stunning, contrasting the immense grandiosity of the architecture in the spacious government buildings against the tiny, claustrophobic rooms allotted to citizens.  Shot on location in Kiev, in the Ukraine, and Sofia, Bulgaria, the director captures a real sense of desperation and futility, where the bleakness of this family’s trapped existence is really no different than that of other ordinary citizens, as all suffer during Stalin’s reign.  Transported to Kiev, Alexei is employed as a medical officer in a large textile factory, where everyday existence in the Soviet Union is permeated with the presence of the secret police, in particular the heightened xenophobia that runs rampant from ordinary citizens to the ruling apparatus, where everyone falls under suspicion.  The family is consigned to a small, cramped room in a squalid communal house of drunken unemployed men, where one of the lodgers possesses keys to all the mail boxes and has the task of checking everyone’s letters on a regular basis.  Marie is horrified and immediately vows to find a way back to France, but without a passport, they are trapped behind the Iron Curtain and imprisoned to involuntary servitude, where she is contemptuously treated like a foreign spy, and the only reason they remain alive is Alexei’s considerable medical skills.  When the elderly Russian landlady of the house is caught singing a French song with Marie, she is rounded up by the KGB agents and imprisoned for consorting with a foreign spy, dying shortly afterwards, where her son Sasha (Sergei Bodrov Jr.) is about be thrown out into the streets.  Without a word of discussion, Marie insists they can make room for him, where Sasha becomes like an older brother to their own son, but Alexei is disturbed by the continual lack of privacy at home and how he’s continually hounded at work to prove his Soviet credibility. 

The film consistently supports multiple storylines that occasionally interconnect, extended through time, given a near historic reach, where a traveling French theatrical troupe happens to be visiting Kiev and Marie desperately bursts into the dressing room of the star, Catherine Deneuve as Gabrielle Develay, known for her leftist political leanings, and hands her a letter to give to the French Consulate in France, an act Gabrielle can’t ignore.  With the KGB agents literally at her door, this turns into a tricky situation, as it puts Marie’s husband in a vulnerable position, as he can’t afford to offend the Communist regime.  He’s fraught with his own personal travails, as due to his wife’s inattention, he sleeps with the Soviet landlady in the building, immediately kicked out by Marie, so instead he moves in across the hall with his mistress.  When the Communists hear about this, it all sounds so French to them, urging him to divorce his wife and receive a large apartment as compensation.  Sasha figures into his own storyline, as he’s a world class swimmer that falls for Marie, dropped from the swim team due to his lethargy after his grandmother’s death, where Marie revives his training regimen swimming in the Dnieper River, where he rubs his body with lard to protect him from the cold.  Eventually he is welcomed back to the team where his skills may allow him to defect to the West, and perhaps free Marie from France.  The splendid cinematography from Laurent Dailland is impressive, while the soundtrack by Patrick Doyle is equally enthralling at times, powerful and dramatic, feeling much like a rhapsodic Rachmaninov piano concerto, where the intensity rises at times to the level of a thriller.  As the film leaps forward in large blocks of time, their initial hopes are continually thwarted and slowly dissipate, while their weary lives seem to move at a glacier pace, where the bleakness of the Stalinist state retains the upper hand, where it’s in the Russian blood to endure hardships, characterized by long suffering.  Except for a few brief scenes, the film unwinds entirely in the Soviet Union, advancing into an era when Stalin actually increased his nationalist fervor, including his anti-Semitic belligerence by rounding up the remaining Jews and sending them to Gulags, while also renewing show trials, intensifying the purges, pogroms, mass enslavement, and murder.  Yet throughout it all, this is an emotionally compelling story of would-be survivors with differing cultural instincts in play, where Alexei and Marie are two extremely resourceful and complex individuals whose enduring relationship evolves into larger-than-life feelings, where the Soviet Army Choir echoes thunderously throughout the journey.  

The Way Back

THE WAY BACK                                                       B                     

USA  (133 mi)  2010  d:  Peter Weir

Peter Weir hasn’t made a film in 8 years, which is a staggering revelation considering the superb craftsmanship associated with his films, especially the breathtaking visualizations.  Perhaps he hasn’t been able to raise funds after the mixed reception of his last work, MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003), which played fast and loose with the historical facts, actually changing the storyline from the book upon which the movie was based in order to fit the gung-ho George W. Bush saber rattling war scenario that was taking place at that time.  This is a National Geographic funded project which allows him to film in some of the more remote areas of the globe, based on a 1955 book The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slawomir Rawicz, where he and several others escaped from a Siberian gulag in 1940 and in a year’s time walked 4000 miles from Siberia, finding and following Lake Baikal, trekking past the Tran Siberian railway to Outer Mongolia (also Communist), across the Gobi Desert, past the Great Wall of China (still Communist) into the Himalayan Mountains, initially finding refuge in Tibet, but continuing their trek into India where the British government at the time was staunchly against both the Nazi’s and the Russians, though the Russians were a war ally.  There has been some controversy about the book, as it was initially released as the author’s own story, but when it was revealed afterwards that he was released by the Russians under a 1942 amnesty agreement, Rawicz indicated it is actually the story of three Polish men who recounted their stories to him, one of whom is a former Polish soldier, Witold Glinski. 

Described as the first Hollywood film about the Soviet gulag, this overly detached and in the end unengaging film opens in Poland in 1940 when it was invaded to the West by Hitler and the Nazi’s, and from the East by Stalin and the Russians, opening with a Stalinest interrogation sending a Polish citizen to a Russian gulag for twenty years for making negative statements about Stalin.  The conditions there are decripit, with prisoners starving from lack of adequate food, housing prisoners with professional killers who run the inside of the prisons with smuggled weapons.  In reality, these were forced labor camps, something that was common in both Japan and China during this same time period, where the conditions were so brutal that escape seemed the only viable option.  In Siberia, however, the natural elements are so severe, and the distance so great, that chances of survival from an escape are rare to slim.  This film is reminiscent of the epic Japanese War Trilogy THE HUMAN CONDITION (1959-61), a three part drama by Masaki Kobayashi who documents similar conditions when defeated Japanese soldiers were simply abandoned and left on the mainland of Manchuria, China and had little hopes of ever finding their way back home, where the film follows the futile efforts of one soldier who escaped from a Russian gulag only to wander endlessly, starving for days on end without food, making his way alone through the vast emptiness of the barren landscape, eventually succumbing to weakness and starvation, left to die alone, frozen in the bleak emptiness of a desolate winter.  These exact same circumstances await the seven escapees, one of whom freezes to death the very first night. 

Featuring breathtaking cinematography by Russell Boyd, the humans are specks on the landscape as they initially make their way out of the Siberian forest before becoming engulfed in the immensity of the world around them, afraid to show themselves in Stalinest nations for fear they’d be turned back in to the authorities, so they instead have to creep around towns and hide where they could.  When they reach flat landscapes, it’s most treacherous, as it’s also harder to find food and water out in the open spaces.  One of the film’s failings is the inability to deal with the subject of starvation, which should have been everpresent throughout the journey, yet they somewhat nonchalantly find food all too easily.  Finding water in the desert was truly miraculous, but there was very little tension established about finding food.  Instead when people started to physically deteriorate, attention was paid to physical injuries or ailments, but no words spoken about food, which had to have been on their minds, perhaps even hallucinating about it.  Also, some of the arduous nature of their adventure is glossed over, as the seasons change from ferocious winter storms to spring pretty quickly.  The film also does little to delineate between the characters, where the audience never develops an emotional attachment to any of them, or understands why one is considered the navigator or leader, when he’s actually the youngest or newest prisoner, which makes little sense.  Who made him in charge?  In reality, it’s human nature for there to have been some dissension in the ranks over leadership, yet in this film there was no discussion whatsoever.  It was this lack of tension or screen intensity between the characters that left a feeling of vague disconnection with the audience, where the enormity of what was taking place rarely developed into an acute sense of awareness or personal triumph, never really becoming quite so intensely powerful as Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), which remains the definitive film on the subject, perhaps because the journey coincided with monumental social changes, so the epic adventure was superbly and dramatically placed in historical context.