The film centres on the Russian city of Ozersk, or City 40, a secretive town surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards that sits next to a plant that produced plutonium in the Cold War and continues to process nuclear waste.
Iranian-born Goetschel, who smuggled herself and a film crew into the town, tells the tale of ordinary people living in one of the most contaminated and deadly places in the world whose inhabitants are led to believe they are the nuclear shield and saviours of the world.
Lifting the veil of secrecy on the town, Goetschel and her team encounter a string of willing participants who risk their lives to warn of the perilous and precarious lives of the town’s inhabitants. Goetschel described the the town as a “twilight zone”, in which its citizens live in a “different dimension, a different concept of time and reality”.
Harding kicked off the Q&A with a discussion of the difficulties Goetschel faced in entering the town which at one time was so secretive it did not appear on Russian maps. Goetschel explained that she and the crew stayed in a sanitarium outside the city and made contact with inhabitants in an effort to convince them to help them enter. “The worst that can happen is that they’ll shoot me dead,” Goetschel said.
The willingness of the documentary’s contributors was also discussed. Goetschel explained that the physical barbed wire that surrounds the town had translated into a psychological fence that could only be broken by telling their story. “You have to understand their mentality,” Goetschel said. “They have lived behind barbed wire fences and that’s their identity. They are not supposed to talk and that’s their identity. They have been told they would be killed. But then there was a click that made them decide to talk. The most important thing was that they knew they were risking their lives. They were thinking we are dying anyway and they trusted me for whatever reason.”
City 40 -film by Samira Goetschel – closed nuclear city in Russia – woman human rights activist there @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/IJTZl6vOD4
— Jill Nicholls (@JillNicholls01) June 14, 2016
Nadezhda Kutepova, a human rights activist and single mother whose story is at the heart of the documentary, has since been forced to flee to France after she was accused of industrial espionage. Asked if she felt guilty that her film may have played a role in forcing Kutepova to quit her home, Groetschel said: “No, she made a choice and she’s on a crusade. She’s a tough woman and she knew what she was doing. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) had harassed her and her children and she knew the risks.”
https://twitter.com/tgbuckley/status/742831042508251137
The editing process also posed a challenge for Groetschel and she cut the film three times from scratch in an effort to “create a narrative which would be helpful and would have meaning”. Groetschel said that no one in the city had seen the film because internet and TV is so tightly controlled but she hoped to show it to Kutepova in France.
]]>
1 November 2006. Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.
Based on the best part of a decade’s reporting, as well as extensive interviews with those closest to the events, Luke Harding‘s A Very Expensive Poison is the definitive inside story of the life and death of Alexander Litvinenko.
The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.
Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.
Along with Luke Harding, we are delighted to welcome Marina Litvinenko at the BookNight dinner.
The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.
For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.
]]>Luke Harding will be joined by a panel at the Frontline Club to discuss his experiences as The Guardian's Moscow correspondent and what they tell us about Russia today.
]]>
In 2007 Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for The Guardian. Not long after, mysterious agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, broke into his flat. He was followed, bugged, and even summoned to Lefortovo, the FSB’s notorious prison.
The break-in was the beginning of a psychological war against the journalist and his family that burst into the open in 2011 when he was expelled from Moscow for reporting allegations that under Vladimir Putin the country had become a “virtual mafia state”.
The first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War, Luke Harding has written about his run-in with the new Russia in his recently published book, Mafia State. It includes unpublished material from confidential US diplomatic cables, published by WikiLeaks last year, that described Russia as a “virtual mafia state”.
Luke Harding will be joined by a panel at the Frontline Club to discuss his experiences as The Guardian‘s Moscow correspondent and what they tell us about Russia today.
Chaired by James Meek, writer and reporter. He has reported for the Guardian since 1985, between 1991 and 1999 from the former USSR. In 2004 his reporting from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay won a number of awards, including Britain’s Foreign Reporter of the Year award. He is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, most recently We Are Now Beginning Our Descent.
With:
Luke Harding, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. He was previously the Guardian’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and has reported for the paper from Afghanistan and Iraq. Author of Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia and the co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy.
Angus Roxburgh, author and renowned journalist, he was the Sunday Times Moscow correspondent in the mid-1980s and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. He is the author of The Second Russian Revolution, Pravda: Inside the Soviet Press Machine and most recently The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder of the secret services watchdog website Agentura.ru and co-author of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB.
Susan Richards, a non-executive director and founder of Open Democracy and a specialist on Russian affairs. She is the author of two books; Epics of Everyday Life, about the lives of ordinary Russians in the transition from communism and Lost & Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland, which covers the period 1992-2008.
]]>Next week we will be joined by the Guardian’s Luke Harding and the BBC’s Angus Roxburgh to discuss their experiences reporting from Russia and whether the country is a Mafia State.
There are two third party events next week; on Monday you are invited to join the Unreported World team as they launch their autumn series. On Wednesday Communications Inc will be bringing together a panel to discuss whether increased media attention on the state of our oceans can help save them.
Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blog or download our podcasts on iTunes.
]]>