I’m starting to worry that Christmas will come and pass, we will enter 2016, half of it will be gone…and all the things I have to say about the docs I’ve recently seen will remain unsaid. So this week I’ll take some time to write about these films. Because there is one thing I do every November and I did it this November too. That is going to the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, which is my yearly treat of good docs, fresh from the oven.
All posts tagged Chernobyl
Stalker: a photo series of people living in the shadow of the Chernobyl disaster
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a 30 km area surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The estimated levels of radiation there are really high and living there is not safe for any living being. But still, there are three categories of people who do go into that zone. Some of them are workers, who risk their lives to construct a new sarcophagus to isolate the melted core of the reactor. Their work has been documented by Gerd Ludwig in his long term project about Chernobyl. In the second category are the people who couldn’t say goodbye to their homes, and I previously wrote about Diana Markosian’s bittersweet story of Lida and Mikhail, a couple who chose not to abandon their village, if though they were advised to do so. And the last category is the one documented by Donald Weber, in his Stalker photo series. This category is made of people who transgress the border of the forbidden area and enter Pripyat, the abandoned Chernobyl city to strip it of its remaining valuables.
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