Airdate: The Russian Woodpecker

Next week SBS 2 will screen The Russian Woodpecker, a documentary about a man who returns to Chernobyl, 30 years after its nuclear disaster, in search of answers.

Fedor Alexandrovich is a radioactive man. He was four years old in 1986, when he was exposed to the toxic effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and forced to leave his home.

Now 33, he is an artist in Ukraine, with radioactive strontium in his bones and a singular obsession with the earth-changing catastrophe. Alexandrovich questions why it actually happened, whether there was more to the story than the Soviet government let on and most importantly, what did this all have to do with the giant, mysterious steel pyramid now rotting away two miles from the disaster site: a hulking Cold War weapon known as the Duga and nicknamed ‘the Russian Woodpecker’ for the strange, constant clicking radio frequencies that it emits.

In this documentary conspiracy thriller, directed by Chad Gracia, Alexandrovich returns to the ghost towns in the radioactive Exclusion Zone to try to find answers and to decide whether to risk his life by revealing them, amid growing clouds of Ukraine’s emerging revolution and war.

Thursday, 28 April at 9.30pm on SBS 2.