City 40

In the middle of Russia there is a city ringed with barbed wire and watched by armed guards: Ozyorsk. It was founded in 1945 and for many years did not appear on maps, and its residents could not leave. The city produced the plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb. The price was heavy: the lake beside it counts among the most contaminated places on the planet, and in 1957 there was a major nuclear accident in the area. For years the people were not told what had happened. Samira Goetschel's documentary was shot with hidden cameras and Russian archive footage. The risk for anyone in the city who agreed to speak was considerable. Nadezhda Kutepova, the activist who appears in the film, later had to leave the country and was granted asylum in France.