Thanks to my girlfriend’s last minute Googling to entertain our Friday evening, we had the great luck to discover the Margaret Mead Film Festival happening at the American Museum of Natural History. It was 6:45 p.m. at Rockefeller and we were hoping to catch a show about robots at 7:00 p.m. so we hurried downstairs and took a cab across town to get there just in time. Unfortunately we were a day off on the robots show but we decided instead to watch Tankograd, a film about a dance company set in “the most polluted area on earth.”

Tankograd, directed by Boris Bertram, is a documentary about an exceptional dance company that has managed to thrive in the city of Chelyabinsk in Southwestern Siberia, formerly home to the largest Soviet facility for nuclear physics. The city was next to the site of several industrial accidents which introduced massive doses of fissile material into the environment. According to several non-governmental organizations interviewed in the film, the facilities also dumped millions of gallons of untreated waste into the rivers for decades. Overall, this has led to Chelyabinsk being over twenty times more polluted with radioactive contamination than the Chernobyl site.

When asked to talk about the pollution, locals don’t have much to say. One character talks about areas where you are not allowed to eat wild game or swim in the water, although he is not sure why. Another character says it is rude to talk about the accidents, and people try to keep it out of their minds. One doctor explains that birth defects have only become widespread in the youngest generation and tend to affect the immune system. Digestive tract tumors are also increasingly widespread in adults due to progressive biomagnification of contaminants in the food chain.

Contrasted to this grim setting is the extraordinary quality of the dancers themselves, who manage to get along with life and even thrive despite the pollution that they consume every day. The dancers practice throughout the film, climaxing in a beautiful modern dance at the end. As I watched them, the dancers defied my biases associated with “irradiated” people. They are healthy and extremely precise in their movements, energetic and original. Bertram shows that the patterns of life persist in the most extreme circumstances.

Tankograd is an inspiring and surprising movie. However, for such an interesting topic, the director leaves the audience with many questions. It doesn’t do a particularly good job talking about dance or addressing the environmental situation. There are tidbits, such as the NGO interviews, which address the magnitude of the radioactive contamination, but only in the grossest terms. We never learn what kind of waste was left behind, or how it moves through the food chain, or what geographic factors have caused it to persist or spread in the Chelyabinsk region. We learn that after-effects seem to have hit the third generation the hardest, although we never learn why—is it due to accumulated genetic mutations, progressive spread of the contamination, or something else? Why is the immune system compromised more than other systems in the body?

We learn of the importance of dancing for the characters in their own words, but we don’t learn a great deal about the dance traditions they come from, or how the culture of dance has changed over the decades in the former USSR and this region in particular. The seemingly climactic moment of the film is when we get to see the pivotal performance that we have been preparing for throughout the film. However, the director cuts the bulk of this and only shows a few minutes of dancing. On top of that it is layered over by the filmmaker’s own soundtrack, so the audience is removed from the performance.

The film wastes a lot of screen time showing dancers in their daily routines, unedited: getting out of bed, making breakfast, talking about their plans for the day, sitting together with long pauses in dialogue, sounds of automobiles in the background. Although this aspect of the characters is certainly important, Bertram simply leaves the camera rolling, filling the screen with dead space in many of these segments. As Stanley Kubrick pointed out, the main artistic tool that separates cinema from any other art is editing, and this film could have been much more meaningful if the director had more thoroughly edited out all the dead space he decided to leave in. By contrast, if he had kept the camera rolling for the dance finale and kept the original soundtrack in place, he may have given the film a much more satisfying emotional climax.

Equally perturbing was the overuse of slow-motion sequences of the characters set to dreamy-depressive Scandinavian electro-acoustic style music. Although the dramatic effect of letting the audience fall into a trance to the graceful bodies of the dancers was achieved once or twice, it became a recurring theme throughout the 58 minutes of film, which grew very tiresome.

This feeling of disappointment was only heightened by the Q&A session with director Boris Bertram which immediately followed. To questions regarding the history of dance, or even the styles employed, the director drew a blank. He also shirked away from a question about why he deliberately cut off so much of the final dance sequence. He did not know anything about what had been done to redress grievances of the victims by the current Russian government, or what the contemporary dialogue was on the issue of contamination. He knew insultingly little about any of the most basic questions concerning the environmental situation, except that it was bad. He even tried to get the host of the event to cut the Q&A session early twice!

Although Tankograd gives you an interesting look at a severe environmental disaster obviously overlooked for all these years, it feels somewhat exploitative and overly emotional, with less information than you hope to get out of a documentary. This notion is only reinforced by meeting the director himself, who seems to have done very little of the most basic background research you would have hoped for in a film about such interesting topics, and had a regretfully unpleasant attitude towards most of the audience members who questioned him with even the slightest critical tone.

Criticisms aside, I still credit Boris Bertram for exposing us to a place I formerly knew nothing about, and reinvigorating people’s awareness of the extreme cold war environmental negligence that still affects millions of people around the world. His film shows that exceptional individuals can come from extreme hardship, and he has helped broadcast the talents of a great group of dancers.