Belgium-based Moldovan filmmaker Olga Lucovnicova had the idea for her new short film Object 817, produced by Frederik Nikolai of Flemish production outfit While We’re Here, while researching her first feature, the upcoming My Grandmother’s Letters. Her grandmother lived in a remote part of the Urals, some 1700 miles east of Moscow and close to a strangely deserted city which housed very few people but nevertheless contained 7 huge cemeteries. It is rumoured that Andrei Tarkovsky was inspired to make his science fiction classic Stalker while visiting this region.
“I found out that this is also the most monitored point on Earth from space by CIA satellites since the Cold War. And it’s also the most [radioactively] polluted point on earth as well,” says Lucovnicova. Her father, who accompanied her to the Urals, also knew about the area and its highly secretive aspect. “When he was in the army…he learned from his friend that there are over 40 secret cities in the Urals where the access is forbidden, and this region is one of these type of cities.”
So Lucovnicova, whose debut My Uncle Tudor won both the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale 2021 and the European Film Award, decided to visit the place and found a driver who was happy to show her its devastated landscape and ruins, eventually telling her of a friend, a former police officer, who had investigated an alien find there in 1996.
When she was a teenager, Lucovnicova had seen a Discovery Channel article about an alien that had been found in the Urals but had dismissed it as a laughable fake story. But it transpired this was the same alien whose investigator she was about to meet. What’s more, he had the original video footage that contained much more than what was broadcast on the Discovery Channel.
The creature, dubbed Alien Alyoshka, was 22cm long with thin legs, a strange helmet-like skull and six pairs of ribs. It also gave off a heavy pungent smell, similar to epoxy resin. On tape, people muse as to whether it is an alien or a miscarried human child that had undergone a shocking mutation. After all, the levels of radiation were very high in the region. Strange frogs were reported to have appeared by the river, the film explains, and a small girl who played by the water died three days after contracting a disease whereby the flesh “fell from her bones.”
The police officer met resistance from superiors when he attempted to investigate the case further. “Imagine this police officer somewhere in the Urals in the 1990s, having a call at his police station that there is a body in an apartment and he comes to see it and then discovers this unusual thing,” Lucovnicova explains the wave of incredulity the officer faced. “He tried to open the police case, but his boss didn’t allow him because there wasn’t a real call for a missing ‘something.’ It was just strange discovery. And imagine in the 1990s opening a police dossier on the discovery of an alien. It was totally impossible for him.”
So he took the ‘alien’ home where he kept in his fridge, until his wife insisted it be removed. After he contacted people claiming to be authorities on UFOs, they took it away for analysis, and that was the last he ever saw of it.
But the story was out there, and the myth was born. “This alien became a landmark of the city,” says Lucovnicova. “They made a monument to this alien, and some people even come to pray in front of this monument. They even have a festival dedicated to it. There are songs dedicated to this alien. And every year they celebrate his birthday.”
“So it’s really a symbol,” Lucovnicova adds, before alluding to the history of Soviet nuclear activity in the region form the 1950s onwards. “For me it’s a symbol of how our human psychologist world works to protect ourselves even from really harmful real secrets, secrets which are difficult to live with for this community who live in this restricted area…You see armies, you see soldiers, and they know unconsciously you live in this fear and impossibility to talk about the truth behind what is happening behind these walls.”
The director further tells how, when she checked into the local hotel with her Moldovan passport, she was visited within two days by the KGB and questioned as to what she was doing there.
“They hadn’t seen me filming. I was really lucky that they didn’t check my bags because I had cameras and recorders. I had an interview of a person who works in the nuclear plant in this city. So I was really lucky that they didn’t check these things, but they kept interrogating me for four hours. I was with my father who was born nearby. So he explained that we came to see our relatives in one city and now we are going to another city, and this hotel is just in the middle.”
The feature film that Moldovan Lucovnicova is making (My Grandmother’s Letters) tells of the desperate tendency towards suicide in her Russian family, and she is determined “to end this toxic cycle of family tragedy and family secrets passed down through generations.”
While she laughs off her experience of interrogation in the hotel, it was nevertheless an instructive episode, she notes.
“It helped me to understand better the society where my grandmother lived. It helped me to understand what the local people go through…It looks like everything is possible, that everything is open access, but then it’s not. So it really helped me therefore to understand better my feature length documentary,” Lucovnicova signs off.
