How to film radiation? Kazakh filmmaker Zhanana Kurmasheva does a remarkable job of suggesting its presence, sickening and all-pervasive, in her debut feature documentary We Live Here – a title which also seems to imply the unspoken sentiment that ‘we’ll die here’.
It gives her film a haunting sense of horror, enhanced by the sounds of winds blowing across the desolate Kazakh steppe (carrying unseen evil) and a sensitive soundtrack by Kazakh composer Akmaral Mergen.
At the same time, there is an immense beauty to the brownish-grey landscape of endless rolling hills of rock, sand and grass, as well as to the intimate portrayal of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union’s foremost nuclear test site Semipalatinsk (latterly named Semey), also known as ‘The Polygon.’ Interspersed with wonderfully composed impressions of the land and buildings, sometimes in the form of surprising montages (including flashes of archive material), nature and culture somehow blend into an inseparable whole – as if the radioactive rays were the invisible, unbreakable threads that bind the land and its people together.
It is this ghostly sense of aesthetics, which succeeds in capturing, as Kurmasheva mentions in the press notes, “a place of immense beauty and profound sorrow – a paradox etched into the land itself,” which elevates this interesting and relevant, but fairly straightforward subject matter into true cinema: the big screen is certainly warranted here.
The first explosions at the Semipalatinsk test site took place in 1949. Following Kazakhstan’s independence from the Soviet Union and some large-scale anti-nuclear protests by a newly invigorated civil society, the site was closed in 1991. This was after having suffered 456 blasts – a quarter of all nuclear explosions ever conducted – with, according to official estimates, 1.5 million people exposed to the fallout, all under the cloak of Soviet secrecy.
But this wasn’t the end of the radiation, of course. Kurmasheva (born in that same year, 1991, and whose own mother was born near the village of Kainar, close to Semipalatinsk and also subject to fallout) follows three generations of one family, who all suffer directly or indirectly from their toxic environment. Research into third and fourth generation effects is lacking, however, which means that the young daughter’s aplastic anemia (a blood condition linked to radiation exposure) is not officially recognised as attributable to the former test site.
However, the vast testing area (roughly the size of Slovenia) has still not been fenced off and Kurmasheva shows cattle obliviously grazing on contaminated grounds.
That these areas are still poisoned is regularly confirmed by researchers who cross the steppe on foot in white hazmat suits. Filmed from above by a slow-moving drone, they look like astronauts lost on an unknown planet, with abandoned concrete ruins as markers of a collapsed civilisation. But with their hands and parts of their faces exposed, I’m honestly not sure what level of protection they can rely on.
There is certainly a post-apocalyptic vibe here, which Kurmasheva explicitly uses as a warning to viewers everywhere, not just in Kazakhstan: look at what our own lands, the lands we live on and are deeply connected to, could turn into if we would return to the era of nuclear testing, provocations and possibly even war. Fragments of radio news reports in the background about the ongoing war in Ukraine are certainly not coincidental.
It finds an echo in the scene where Kazakh children are taken on a tour of the local EcoMuseum and, in response to a question from a curious little blue-haired kid, are told how a full-scale nuclear war would probably destroy ninety per cent of human civilisation. The only thing the guide forgets to add, is that those wiped out are probably the lucky ones.
Ultimately, while there are strong elements of beauty, care and empathy in Kurmasheva’s film, We Live Hereoffers no real sense of hope. But hey, in 24,400 years, the Plutonium-239 still in the ground at Semipalatinsk will have decayed enough to make the area safe for humans again.
Kazakhstan, 2025, 80 minutes
Director Zhanana Kurmasheva
Production Plan B
Producers Banu Ramazanova
Script Zhanana Kurmasheva
Cinematography Kuanysh Kurmanbayev
Editing Aidan Serik
Sound design Ilya Gariyev
Music Akmaral Mergen
With Bolatbel Baltabek, Nurbol Baltabekov, Dmitry Kalmykov
