Collapse

1986, the Chernobyl disaster. Couples, friends and a journalist willing to take risks are woven into the larger frame of the catastrophe, and panic follows. The film does not build the explosion as a scene of spectacle; it tells how information was delayed and who learned what and when. The account puts at its centre the gap between official statements and what people could see. It was made in 1990, just before the Soviet Union came apart, and widened the limit of what could be said at the time. The account looks for no heroism and holds nobody alone responsible. It ends not in a resolution but in a coming apart. Sergey Shakurov plays the lead in Mykhailo Belikov’s hundred and one minute Soviet film, completed in 1990.