Price of Power

The 27-minute film was praised by the jury for portraying the issues in depth and for its display of creativity despite a shoestring budget. High Power traces the Tarapur nuclear power plant as the epicentre of health issues that have plagued the town. Those diseases include cancer,kidney and heart-related issues,to problems such as,impotency and low IQ in children. One of the segments documents the curious case of a woman,who was working at the plant and suddenly died. All three of her sons were found to be unable to reproduce children.

Indulkar’s experience in environment education and engineering enabled him to ground his film on solid scientific reasoning. “The plant was established in the ’60s,but it usually takes 15-20 years for the effects to come to the fore. These people,who are largely uneducated,know about them at a very surface level,” says the filmmaker,who was accompanied by one of the villagers to the festival at Rio De Janeiro.

Indulkar’s film has a loosely fictional storyline that sees its protagonist,a working-class urban man returning to his village where he discovers the potential horrors that await his native place. “The protagonist,a city-dweller and a primary user of electricity,realises that the bills they pay are far less than the price these people living near the Tarapur plant pay,” says Indulkar,who took two years to put together the film. While people such as Vikram Gokhale (for Marathi) and Tom Alter (for English) did the voiceovers free of cost,other studios from the Marathi film industry lent out their studios for post-production.

The film awaits clearance from the Censor Board of Film Certification in India. The decision of its review committee for making anti-government policy statements is pending. The film will now be shown as part of the travelling itinerary of Uranium Film Festival,which will tour Germany in September and Russia next year.