TWO CINEMATIC VERSIONS OF HORROR: 1 HUMANITARIAN, 1 COMEDIC : ‘WOMEN’--DOCUMENTARY WITH ANTI-WAR MESSAGE

The Soviet nuclear plant disaster at Chernobyl has made film maker Vivienne Verdon-Roe more adamant than ever about making the world a safer place in which to live.

“What’s just happened in Chernobyl and with the Challenger shuttle,” she said, “just shows us that our technology is very fragile--that there can be mistakes and accidents--and that we need to look at human solutions to human problems, rather than find another new technological fix.”

Solving human problems--such as starvation and disease--instead of building more nuclear weapons is a thematic thread running through “Women--for America, for the World,” Verdon-Roe’s fourth and latest anti-nuclear film. The film airs May 19 on Atlanta superstation WTBS at 7:30 p.m. (PDT).

“The film is about the sacrifice we are making right now in order to continue the arms race,” Verdon-Roe said. “It compares the bloated military budget with unmet human needs around the world.”

Geraldine Ferraro, Shirley Chisholm, Joanne Woodward and 19 other women--including politicians, writers and a union leader--deliver impassioned pleas to end the arms race. The 28-minute documentary intersperses their interviews with shots of malnourished Third World children, Hiroshima victims and smiling Soviet citizens.

The English-born Verdon-Roe, a former teacher in her homeland, altered her life and career six years ago when she saw “The Last Epidemic,” the chilling anti-nuclear film by Eric and Ian Thiermann, who subsequently co-produced her next three.

Her first film (made in 1983), in which children express their fear of nuclear war and their “anger at adults for jeopardizing their future” is “very controversial” and originally inspired “a lot of hate mail,” she said.

“ ‘Women--for America’ is not frightening, and it’s not an angry film,” said Verdon-Roe, who directed and produced the project. “It’s not guilt-tripping you, and it’s not about what would happen if we had a nuclear war. It’s a gentle film, and these women speak out with good common sense and a real sense of compassion and humanity.

“There are facts and figures in the film, but they relate to human consequences,” she said, “like we have 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world already with which we can blow each other up several times over; that defense contractors are making an enormous amount of money out of this, and that four days’ worth of worldwide military spending could, in fact, eliminate starvation.”

Verdon-Roe, a 36-year-old resident of Oakland, said the idea for her all-woman film--her first as director--came while she was working in the offices of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the national organization for which she has long been a volunteer.

“I noticed it was the women who were doing all the background work--the grunt work--and when it came to needing an on-stage star or someone to do a radio interview, it was the men who went.

“I asked some of the women, ‘Why aren’t you going out there and doing the talking?’ And they would say, ‘I just don’t have it, I can’t speak about this issue with the passion of Helen Caldicott (the anti-nuclear activist and physician who has lectured worldwide on the subject).’ Then, for 10 minutes they spoke with the passion of Caldicott.

“I realized that women have traditionally been excluded from anything to do with the military and that we feel intimidated by people who say, ‘Leave it up to the experts; you don’t know enough about this, dear.’ I thought that women didn’t need a whole lot more facts and figures--we had the basics--what women really needed was confidence. So I made a film to show them they already have the necessary skills and qualities and that it’s important they use their voices.”

Verdon-Roe conducted some of the interviews during the 1984 conference of the Committee for National Security. She taped the others individually, meanwhile raising $50,000 in production costs, mostly from private donors.

Then she made arrangements to air the film on WTBS with the Better World Society (a nonprofit organization founded and chaired by WTBS owner Ted Turner), which acquires and produces television programming on arms control, world peace, environmental preservation and population containment.

The film, introduced by Jane Alexander, marks the premiere of a new arms control series presented by Better World, whose international board of trustees includes former President Jimmy Carter and Georgy A. Arbatov, a member of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee.

“Women--for America, for the World,” to be shown at the Nuart here Wednesday and Thursday nights (see adjacent story), has already been seen in Europe.

Last November, several ambassadors, their wives and staff members attending the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting watched the documentary in Geneva. Verdon-Roe traveled to Switzerland with the 35-member Women for a Meaningful Summit.

“The response (to the film) was really great,” she said, discussing the serious subject with characteristic optimism and vigor. “I don’t think it matters what country you’re from, you’re pretty moved when you see kids needlessly suffering from preventable diseases and from starvation, which we could deal with so easily.”

During the film’s airing on WTBS, American viewers will be given a toll-free number to call for free “action guides” outlining ways they can work for nuclear disarmament. She says she is confident that such individual efforts can “absolutely” help to end the threat of nuclear holocaust.

“Americans have incredible power,” she said. “They ended the Vietnam War, they abolished slavery and they started the civil rights and women’s movements. And all these actions began with a small group of caring, committed individuals.”