ALEXEI AND THE SPRING
アレクセイと泉 (Alexey to izumi) 2002
Documentary. 104 min.
Director: Seiichi Motohashi. Composer: Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Seiichi Motohashi was born five years before the nuclear bombings of Japan eliminated more than 120,000 people, and the Second World War was over. He actually belongs to the generation of those, who grew up witnessing the terrifying aftermath of the most massive nuclear disaster. Young Motohashi began his career as a documentary photographer. His pictures seemed to represent a desperate will to answer questions like ‘How can a human life really be so worthless?’ The humanity was already under the threat of Nuclear war, and people were living with a fear to extinct from global radiation pollution. Motohashi’s search for the highest values of human existence led him really far away from his motherland. In the 90s he visited Eastern Europe and managed to shoot two documentary films, which not only brought him recognition worldwide, but also became an accomplishment of his long journey after something in human nature that can be stronger than death itself.
‘Alexei and the Spring’, the second Motohashi’s documentary film of 2001 tells a story about a small village that is hidden in pinewood forest, in just 180 km. from Chernobyl, the place of another horrible nuclear accident of the XX century. This village is called Budische and it’s still inhabited mostly by old people. The youngest one of them is called Alexei. He was a teenager when the accident occurred, and a great amount of radioactive dust was ejected into the atmosphere and covered a giant area, including his native village. The old people flatly refused to evacuate, so Alexei stayed with his parents. The habitants decided that they wouldn’t leave their home, despite the danger of radiation poisoning.
Motohashi come to see the village 14 years after the accident and found the habitants there, being healthy and living peacefully, like there were no threats to their lives at all. But they actually were: the level of radiation pollution was still dangerously high. The villagers confessed that at first they hadn’t been expecting to live that long at all. The will of these old people and a teenage Alexei was to live less but not far away from home. Only some-time after a final decision to stay in the polluted Alienation Zone a key to surviving was unveiled in the very centre of the village — a small spring, their source of clean and uncontaminated water. These people believed that they were rewarded because they had been brave enough to stick to the birthplaces even if they all were going to die for that. What may seem to be a reckless and unnecessary courage actually is a strong devotion to the moral values that are commonly spread in these places. The full abandonment of the village would be just something like a betrayal. Life and death somewhere far away from a birthplace would be way more tragic than suffering and dying in polluted area.
The voice that tells the whole story of Budische and its inhabitants belongs to Alexei. As well as every fragile sound of this lonely settlement, wonderful music written by Ryuichi Sakamoto sounds like something illusive and barely real. And surprisingly — something that could’ve been composed way earlier, in the 80s. Moreover, the whole visual style of the film constantly reminds of this decade and of the time before the disaster. It’s like these people could freeze the time itself. Isn’t it a good example of what we are capable of while being strong and fearless?