La terre outragée

The Chernobyl disaster, during and 10 years after the event, told as a human-drama movie.

The "during" part is interesting though not entirely compelling - you don't see any of the attempts to combat the disaster and hardly see the reactor. Interesting because you see the effect on the general population.

The "10 years after" part is dull. The characters are uninteresting and the plot goes nowhere.

Overall, doesn't really work - it would have been better if this was a straightforward documentary, rather than an attempted drama.

I saw the movie by accident and was deeply impressed how well Michale Boganim managed to capture humanity and the tragic personal events in this movie, without even showing the events happening directly at the Chernobyl plant.

What touched me most was the connection to their hometown of some of the characters. The discord between leaving a heavily polluted placed and staying on the grounds that were their home for many years.

The interlink of the stories of the characters in the movie are very well done, too and are sometimes just seconds short, which rather reflects real life than some pathetic happy get- together of characters at the end of most Hollywood movies.

If someone has read Svetlana Alexievich book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" /"Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future" , readers probably find this movie as complex and breath-taking as those real eyewitness, post-traumatic stories.

People who are moving to a different place greatly miss all the memories and people, related to a certain place, certain environment. Its a drama of people who suddenly had no choice but move and therefore in some point in their lives wanting to search back for their inner state of comfort and happiness.

Main character Anya who lost her husband in her wedding day tries to re-live her possible life with another man, living near the Zone and working in the Pripyat city as a guide. She understands that trying to re-live her possible life track as if 1986 wouldn't existed doesn't make her happier. She feels lost and unsteady for making new choices.

There is also a story line of a father and kid who got seperated by the tragic events of 1986. That story line portrays endless guilt that the father couldn't resolve during the next decade. He simply dissapeared from his wife and childs life, probably because of fearing to face consequences of accident or possible trial. The kid, however is trying to find him.

In short words, movie shows how environmental catastrophe could impact lives of ordinary people.

La Terre Outragée will turn heads. This beautifully textured drama about the Chernobyl disaster and its long-term legacy was shot on location, giving the film a shocking sense of immediacy. The camera captures the sobering reality of the environmental catastrophe that devastated Ukraine. But the eerily vacant landscape is only a backdrop to the human cost of the tragedy, which is what director and writer Michale Boganim focuses on in her authoritative feature debut.

The film begins in pastoral reverie as a young couple drifts down a sun-dappled river, a place where boys frolic and fishermen dip their rods. Anya (Olga Kurylenko) and Piotr (Nikita Emshanov) are about to be married, but news arrives of an accident at the nuclear power plant, and Piotr, a firefighter, is summoned away from his nuptials. Soon rain begins to fall — black rain — and the disaster's full dimension starts to percolate into the consciousness of the people of Pripyat, a town only a few kilometers away from the power station.

A few years later, Anya is now a local guide for curious tourists who don radiation-proof suits and bus through the town snapping photos of a transformed world. Like many others, Anya finds herself caught between leaving and staying.

As her heroine struggles with her demons, Boganim depicts a community that, despite the dangers, refuses to leave its history behind. The residents' houses — derelict, abandoned and overgrown with weeds — nestle within an area still contaminated with too much radioactivity to be safe, but the lure of the place they call home is like a siren. Squatters move in to family houses while relatives of those killed find themselves trapped and unable to make sense of it all. The aftermath of Chernobyl is fully exposed, forcing us to imagine what a nuclear future might look like — something the people of Fukushima have only just recently contemplated.

Piers Handling

Source: http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2011/landofoblivion

This is a decent drama revolving around a woman whose life is totally upended on her wedding day, which happens to be the day of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and meltdown. Some very good acting.