For a forty-year period from 1949, the Soviet Union carried out an aggressive nuclear testing programme using its own citizens as guinea pigs. In total, 456 bombs were dropped in an area known as “The Polygon” - now rural Kazakhstan. This film visits the villagers that now live in the wake of these tests. Some of these people are hugely disfigured, and a further one in twenty born will also be disfigured or have serious, life-threatening illnesses.
The film explores whether or not this is a direct result of the radiation caused by the nuclear testing. The results are inconclusive and, while the radiation is high, some scientists claim it’s not high enough to have an effect. Others are certain of its affects because they look at themselves in the mirror everyday. The local doctor is fiercely fighting for legislation to pass, so that people from this area are not allowed to have children because of the high disfigurement statistics. The film’s most harrowing moments come when a doctor shows us a collection of dead babies’ bodies kept in jars, disfigured almost beyond belief. Babies born with two heads, a single eye in the forehead and other severely distressing images. Then into the section that looks after children born with problems who have lived: a little boy born with no limbs, for example, and others with such severe issues it was at this stage that a large part of the audience (myself included) began to break down and cry.
For a documentary, it really is some of the hardest viewing I’ve ever been through, and its effect stays with you like an ailment in your own brain. The film raises so many issues it’s difficult to form a cohesive conclusion, and there isn’t one in the film either. The doctor transforms from what you see as a compassionate and enthusiastic man to almost possessed and infatuated, and finally fascist ideals start seeping in - terms such as ‘cleansing’. He even states in the film “Hitler tried this, if it’s based on race then it’s genocide but if it’s based on disease then its medicine”. He savagely speaks to patients of the stupidity and selfishness of their getting pregnant and advises them to abort, often calling their unborn children “monsters” or “morons”. The infrastructure to deal with disabled children simply isn’t there in Kazakhstan, and they are left unwanted and often for dead, living horrid, agonizing - and not to mention very brief - lives. ‘After The Apocalypse’ is a film that questions the essence of moral value on every level, whilst being perfectly executed and profoundly disturbing.