In the course “Ideology and Viewers: East European Film and Media” students discussed a 1990 Soviet film about the Chernobyl disaster, its ideological framework evident in the government and local responses and the way the director depicts them. More excitedly, students could also analyze Kostova’s mini-documentary film finished in February of 2021 and compare the ideological positions of the two films. The students found particularly insightful Kostova’s link of Chernobyl to COVID and the governments handling of each health crisis. About the ideological position of Kostova, one student remarks: “The documentary narrative criticizes the lies of the government and their cowardness. It relies on archive images and testimonies of Bulgarian women who remembered that period. One of them is a physicist and uses scientific words and graphs to support her arguments, which make her very persuasive. The documentary puts also an emphasis on the dramatic side of the situation, using sad music and showing shocking images, … .”
Another responds to the link between Chernobyl and COVID: “’The Truth about Chernobyl…’ makes a stark comparison to the effort made by conservative leaders in America and the United Kingdom to cover up information about COVID-19. Though the film is clearly biased against the Communist regimes and interviewees that offer a different perspective are not included, the lesson of the film is better understood by the comparison to the modern situation. The people, when governments decide to withhold truth from the masses, will create and circulate their own fallacious versions of reality, all the while leading to less action in resolving the situation and compounding suffering.” Similarly, yet another observation focuses on the danger of misinformation regarding health crisis: “This film highlights the effective use of silence as a form of propaganda, and how quickly misinformation spread among the people when the government and media were silent.” Some appreciated the personal testimonies, while again praising the effective comparison between Chernobyl and COVID: “I found the interview segments with the three Bulgarian women the most fascinating. Usually, in discussions of Chornobyl, we focus on Ukraine and USSR, sometimes on Belarus, but the rest of the world is left unnoticed. […] The decision to tie it with the pandemic is fascinating too, and I especially loved the comparisons of how the authorities and people expressed similar attitudes towards the two events.”