Pain métallique

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 aluminium fittings that she can sell to supplement her meagre pension.
Listless cattle look on like spectres 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.