Pripyat

After the catastrophe of 1986 a restricted zone thirty kilometres across was set up around the Chernobyl plant. A hundred and sixteen thousand people were evacuated from that area. But there are still people living and working there, some of whom moved back later. The documentary draws a portrait of those people. The question it asks is this: what is life like with a danger that cannot be seen or grasped. And how they deal with what the accident left behind. Four people tell their own stories in the film. The account shows the zone not as a scene of catastrophe but as somebody’s home. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Austrian documentary, a hundred minutes long, was completed in 1999.