Metal Bread

A day in the life of Tatyana Prokopenko, a courageous woman from Mailuu-Suu, an all-but ghost town in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. Every day, she undertakes the long walk to a mound of broken light bulbs outside town to fish out the aluminum fittings that she can sell to supplement her meager pension. Listless cattle look on like specters in the mist while she busies herself, alone on the haze-shrouded hill. Tatyana is wondering why her workmate Nina hasn’t turned up. There were once large numbers of uranium mines near Mailuu-Suu, so the radioactivity is high – according to some, this is the cause of sudden deaths among older people. But that doesn’t mean Tatyana wants to leave. Once her work is done, she buys bread with the profits and eats it back in her living room. The camera moves around with her, following her like a friend, and Tatyana converses with the crew. Most of the soft-tinted and painterly shots were filmed using a tripod. In a prelude, we visit the light bulb factory that once provided employment for a third of Mailuu-Suu’s population, including Tatyana. The disintegration of the Soviet Union led to mass firings and the decimation of the town’s population.