Today is a 37st anniversary of the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant disaster. It's hard to talk about one unprocessed national tragedy while living through another.
The Chornobyl disaster was totally preventable and it took away countless lives of people living in the region, especially in Ukraine and Belarus - both the liquidators and the civillians. Despite the very air and dust being literal poison, the soviets had not only hid this information from the people, but forced everybody to partake in the May the 1st parade - because god forbid we lose our face before the international community as a working class paradise! If not for the nuclear scientists in Sweden who raised the alarm about the dangerous levels of nuclear particles coming from northern Ukraine, who knows what would have happened. It definitely would have been swepped under the rug and forgotten by the international community, together with its victims - just like Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan is barely known abroad.
With russia constantly threatening to turn Zaporhizhzha nuclear plant into second Chornobyl, the wound caused by this tragedy is cut open again.
We all love the HBO Chornobyl series, and I genuinely am grateful to Craig Mazin for the amount of empathy and respect he brought to the series; but for today I indulge you to watch something made by ukrainians, to try to understand what this tragedy means to us and how it influences our lives even today.
For the documentaries, my favourite series by this day remains the "Dragons live here" by Your Underground Humanitarian School Youtube channel, which, unfortunately, can only offer automated english subtitles - they should, however, be sufficient.
youtube
youtube
youtube
As for the feature films, I recommend "Gateway" (you can stream it online with english subtitles here). And here is the official english trailer: