 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, filmmaker, author, and television host, Holly Morris. Great to be here. I hope it's been a good conference for everybody. So pleased to be here back in my hometown of Chicago and talk to you about the business of saving places. It's really something that is close to my heart in a funny way, and we're going to talk about it through the context of Chernobyl. A place that I think we can all agree is arguably maybe not exactly worth saving. Especially in these times of unprecedented displaced peoples around the globe, whether it's from poverty or environmental disaster or war, I think it's an apt time to be taking on some of these issues. But I'm in the business of saving stories, and you're in the business of saving places, so hopefully over the next hour or so we can make some progress. So we're going to start by going back in time to 1986. As you can see, my first slide is up, and we are at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I'm going to click this and hope that this works. There we go. That is the sound of a dosimeter. As you can see, what we have is Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the background, in the foreground, a Geiger counter or a dosimeter. You have to have one at any time when you're in the zone, and that noise becomes ubiquitous there. Here you can see that it's an unlikely place to sort of grapple with the ideas of wellness in place. Sorry, I'm getting a rough start here. Not moving. There we go. Let's go back a little bit. Not moving on, fellas, can you help me? There we go. So, I'm a journalist, a journalist, a filmmaker, and I was first in Chernobyl in 2010. So, you know, you don't know me, but that look on my face is not journalistic grit or determination to get the story. It's pure fear. Standing in front of the reactor, there's a lot of... This is called the sarcophagus that is over reactor number four, and there's radioactive dust that's blowing out of that. So, I'm there in the middle of essentially a radioactive police state. I'll tell you a little bit more about that, and I'm thinking I just want to get the hell out of there, right? Every time you go into the zone, you have to pass through radiation detectors, and every time you leave the zone, you also have detectors. I put this photo up only because what's interesting about it to me is... Well, let's put it this way. Every time I probably went through there probably 20 times the course of making my film, the babushkas of Chernobyl, and about a third of those times it was unplugged. So, in the context of the lesson for a group like you, you know, you can put the tools and infrastructure of health in place, but if the humans in charge don't buy in, well, the machine might as well be unplugged. Now, the zone, this is a typical abandoned house inside the zone. It's a strange place. There are sort of scattered ghost villages everywhere. It's eerie, bucolic, beautiful, creepy, totally contaminated. Many villages were bulldozed at the time of the accident. That was their first sort of effort at remediation they were buried under, but others like this one sort of sit as silent vestiges to the tragedy. So you get the idea. It's a restricted, lifeless, without cultural living history. I mean, the sign drives the point that there should be no people living anywhere near the dead zone, but the thing is they are in villages like this. So, on that first trip that I took to Chernobyl in 2010, I'd stumbled across the reality that there was a community inside the zone, which immediately captured my attention and became the beginning of the film. It's a typical homestead. You know, the people there defied common sense authorities in 1986 to return to their ancestral homes inside the zone. Now, 1,200 people returned to the zone in the months and weeks after the accident. And today, a little more than 30 years since then, a little over 100 survived. Now, when I first went into a village, I met this woman, Hannah Zavarotnia. She was busy when I met her. She is the self-declared mayor of Kupovate Village, population 8. She, you know, I guess my first question going in when I started meeting people was, you know, I lack the expertise that many of you have here in the audience, and my question are these people ignorant or crazy or both? It was about that simple. I was really two years away from understanding the fierce ties to place that drive and form and even sustain a life. So, Hannah made short work of the pig, which I'm going to very briefly show you in the next picture. It was pretty graphic. I've never actually shown this picture because it is a bit graphic, but in a way it epitomizes the resilience of the people inside the zone and people working together to survive, which is what happened how we got to this moment. The other day, the other thing that happened on the first day I met Hannah was there was this hawk hanging above her chicken coop. She explained to me that when it messed with her chickens, she beat it to death and strung it up as a warning to hawks who might get any ideas. Now, let me tell you a little bit more about Hannah's homestead. You know, as the years gone on, lots of people were evacuated and accepted relocation, but also people are passing away. Again, there were 1,200 people coming back in after the accident. By the time I was there, 230. So, the houses are empty. So, Hannah had one house full of potatoes, one house full of her pickled goods, one house where she was boiling the pig. So, real estate was repurposed pretty significantly. Now, Hannah also lives with her disabled sister who she's been taking care of for some 40 years now. So, we're in her house and I ask Hannah the obvious question about living inside the radioactive zone. She says, radiation doesn't scare me, starvation does. And proceeded to serve me another heap of steaming dumplings and moonshine. The next photo is Hannah and her sister-in-law and Maria. And they've been friends since girlhood. Now, when a soldier nabbed Maria back in 86 when she was trying to get back into her village, she said, shoot me and dig the grave, otherwise I'm staying. Now, you have to remember, these are women who have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century, the Russians and forced famines of the 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor, that was called. After that, they faced the Nazis in the 40s who moved across raping, killing, and many of these women were sent to Germany as forced labor. So, in 86, when Chernobyl happened and they were being evacuated, they were simply unwilling to leave in the face of an enemy that was invisible. Now, life in the zone is difficult. There's a lot of hardship, there's a lot of suffering and sadness. People cannot, the children, anyone under 18, can only come once a year. And of course, so their grandchildren, they rarely see. Their own children, adult children, if they have them, if they're lucky enough to have them in the region, come in frequently. So there is a lot of isolation and sadness, which makes their micro-community, their micro-hood, all that more important. So, you know, co-social cohesion among this group is everything, really, despite their diminishing numbers. And they really articulated it in a very high-spirited way. I'm going to show you a quick clip from the film. Oh, that's not it. Sorry, guys. Here we go. That was just supposed to be a high-spirited moment. But humor, I have to say, there was so much of it inside the zone. It's a place we only think of generally as suffering and death, and there is a lot of that. But as a filmmaker, I did run into some problems when I was like, God, they're really funny. And how do you make a funny Chernobyl film? And it's not that me imposing that on them. They were just really funny, and it was a tool for survival and resilience, I believe. My favorite moment of the film, I didn't put up here, is when Maria and Hannah, and they're all sitting around, and Maria holds up a little bit of booze, shoots it back, says, Goodbye, brain, see you tomorrow, and shoots it back. And I'm like, oh, God, that's got to be in this trailer. You know, but we're on a t-shirt. It was great. But, you know, so part of the challenge as a filmmaker was to represent the complexity of the reality in the zone, that suffering and death, and there have been, you know, thousands of other death-related Chernobyl, live alongside resilience and love of Motherland and moonshine. Um, so somehow we've gotten to that, but sure. Mm-hmm. Going back to Maria here. Nope. There we go. Um, all right. Sorry, guys. We're having a little... This is when I love the fact that there's multiple cameras going on, because this can be edited. Okay. We've taken a left turn here. These are called stalkers. They are a group of young people, mostly Ukrainians, mostly men, who sneak into the zone to pursue some of them radioactive thrills. They have dosimeters. They are searching for the buried machinery dumps where the machinery used after the accident was put, because it was radioactive. Some of them are imitating a video game, which is set inside the zone. And others, let's see here, are going to... This is a radioactive machinery dump. They'll put their dosimeters on the machinery and see how high it can go, and then they will sprint off. Very reckless behavior. This is an interior shot of the town of Pripyat. So there are many villages in the zone, but there's only one city, and this was the company town of the nuclear power plant. And in this city, the residents were evacuated about a day and a half after the accident. They were told they were going to be gone three days. They were, in fact, gone forever. So the city is this kind of elegiac still life that the stalkers sneak into and explore. It's a ghost city now. It is one of the most radioactive places in the zone. But I think some of them are reckless adventurers. But I do think that, like the babushkas, the stalkers are driven by a yearning for place and home and belonging. I mean, you do have to remember that most of them were in their 20s, early 30s. They had never seen the villain at the center of the tragedy that devastated their generation. Their parents' generation often took the lives of their grandparents. And so in a way, they go in to see the reactor and they go in to find pioneer camps, the Soviet camps that they went to as children, and to sort of look back at the past to find their place moving forward. One stalker told me that his grandfather was an engineer in the Chernobyl control room the night of the accident. He was put in prison immediately after the accident and got out and immediately died of cancer. Another worked for fighting the fire after the accident. So they do have, everybody there seems to have, in terms of everybody, but the stalkers as well, have ties. Now this is the Chernobyl, this is an amusement park in Pripyat that is now falling to pieces and the stalkers do go there as well. Kind of a holy grail for the stalkers is the rooftop of the Pripyat buildings. You can see that nature has taken over there. You know, it was a pretty big city with a couple hundred thousand people I think. And so just like the animals have returned to the zone, nature has begun to take over and you can get a look at that there. When I talked to some members of the panel a couple of weeks ago, one person mentioned that displacement can actually change one's genes and I got to thinking about the stalkers in this context because they are in the most dangerous places in the zone. They are young and radioactive contaminants negatively affect them more than older people and they have sort of the double whammy of being in a place that can mess with your cellular makeup as well as, you know, in changing your DNA because of the displacement. So I thought that was quite interesting, maybe something we can talk about in the panel afterwards. This is another shot from the roof. You can see they romanticize this activity quite a bit too. This group of women lived their entire lives together in a town called Moshavow, a village called Moshavow. They went through their weddings, births, sending people off to the army together, everything, their whole lives together. But when I talked to them, this is what they said. We had everything in the forest. Our children will remember, but their children will never know. The stalkers represent the generational impact of displacement and now that generation is who the babushkas are truly worried about. Home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka and connection to the land is really palpable. Perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets, aphorisms about this slip easily and often from their lips. If you leave, you die. Those who left are worked off now. Motherland is motherland. I will never leave. Now, curiously, what sounds like face might actually be fact. This is a doctor at the Chernobyl Medical Center. Now, he was telling me about a study that showed that those who left, those who accepted relocation actually died earlier than those who stayed by some estimates up to 10 years. I mean, this is not to diminish the very real dangers of radiation. There have been, in terms of the deaths from Chernobyl, there have been, Greenpeace says 4,000, I'm sorry, the World Health Organization says 4,000. Greenpeace puts the number of eventual Chernobyl deaths in the tens of thousands. So again, not to minimize that, but what he was talking about is a complicated equation. The Chernys did not suffer relocation trauma, which means they avoided what relocated people suffer everywhere, higher levels of alcoholism, depression, and importantly, disrupted social networks. So the people who accepted relocation were in these soulless high-rises in the outskirts of Kiev, separated from all that was important to them, the gardens, the graves of their children, the sound of stork wings on a spring afternoon, there were real consequences to that. So his summary about those people who were relocated was simply, they die of anguish. So it turns out, home and community are forces that can rival even radiation. And the film I was making, you know, when I went into it, I was thinking, okay, this is a film about radiation, this is about nuclear disaster, this is some interesting people helping to tell that story. But in fact, it ended up not being about that. In fact, it ended up being a film about home. Radiation may be the invisible enemy, but home was the elixir. And I wanted to show you this woman's home, because it typifies so much. Her name's Valentina, she had thyroid cancer, and Place was definitely her antidote. On his deathbed, her husband made her promise to never leave her home. Now she said to me, as I was kind of leaving with sort of twinkle in her eye, up in the attic, I have five jugs of moonshine. When I die, my kids won't have to buy any. You know, she sort of typified a lot. I mean, you know, a comment full of suffering, home, resilience, pragmatism, faith. Now radiation or not, the women of the zone are at the end of their lives. In the next decade, the zone's human residents will be gone, and it will revert to a wild radioactive place full only of animals and occasionally daring flummoxed scientists or reckless searching stalkers. But the spirit and existence of the Babushkas leave us with powerful new templates to think about and to grapple with. About the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the palliative powers of Place, the vital importance of agency and self-determination. To answer my question from the beginning, what's worth saving in a radioactive wasteland? These are the things worth saving from Chernobyl and building into our notions of community in the future. So those are my final thoughts, but let's end on the words of Balatina Ivanovna, a first responder the night of the accident and also a nurse, an herbalist, and most importantly, an angler. This is not the solution to freedom. I've been to the UK for five times already. There are exhaust gases. More than even here. Because every machine has exhaust fuel, and you breathe it in your lungs. You eat it. You eat it all at once. This is not good, this is not good. This is not good. This is a foreign zone. Life doesn't stop here, but nature takes its own. And the river is the same. And the fish lives the same. I'm not going anywhere. Let me have a gun. Thank you.