Getting Stuck in the Basement and Other Disasters

Elaine and I went to the Uptown Theater yesterday to check out the Calgary International Film Festival's double feature on Chernobyl. The ticket said "downstairs" and when we were coming into the theater it looked liked we needed to take the door on the far right. This door led us down a long weird corridor. Although it didn't look like we were going to be reaching a theater anytime soon, I figured that it was the film fest and maybe it was just showing on a small screen somewhere. We eventually made our way through a door at the end of the corridor and found ourselves in a stairway. Realizing that this was definitely not the spot, we tried to go back the way we came. Hmmm... the door was locked. We went up the stairs to another door... also locked. The only door that wasn't locked had big signs on it saying "Fire Door," "Emergency Exit Only," and "Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened." Well, we didn't want to make a scene, but we were stuck. Thanks to the technology of cell phones we called 411, got the number for the theater, called the manager's office and got him to come and retrieve us. How embarrassing!

Nicely situated in our seats in the theater, we settled in to watch two films on the Chernobyl disaster. The first one was titled "Radiophobia" and it focused on a group of people from the nearest town of Pripyat who returned twenty years after the evacuation. It was amazing to see how much destruction time and the elements can wreak on a town that was considered the model of modern USSR at the time. The forest had grown into the town, trees had even taken root inside of buildings, paint was peeling, and everything had been looted. I think the two most shocking things for me were that the people in the town were not told of the disaster until 36 hours after it occurred, and that when they were finally evacuated they were told they'd be back in 3 days.



The second movie was "Half Life" which told the story of the front line workers following the disaster as told by poems. This one was a little more abstract and artsy, but very compelling in places. I was particularly moved by the story of the wife of a fireman who was nursing her husband while he died from severe radiation poisoning/burns.

There are still a couple of days left in the festival, and I'm hoping to make the most of them.