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KEY CREDITS
Developed by
Sergey Bukovsky & Andrei Zagdansky
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SYNOPSIS
This project is still in development.
In 2008 we traveled twice to the Zone of Alienation, or simply the Zone, once home to some 200 thousand people, the towns of Prypyat, Chernobyl, and dozens of villages.
600 people live here now, the number dwindles every year.
We met some of them. They are not bothered by the radioactive contamination in the area, nor by the lack of social services, nor by loneliness. They are possessed by a strong attachment to this poor land surrounded by swamps.
Two of them: Ivan and Yevdokiya Feshchenko are the only inhabitants of the village of Lubyanka. They are in their seventies.
When Ivan and Yevdokiya are no more, nobody will plant potatoes on this land or milk cows.
The taciturn, elderly Adam and Eve are moving backwards in time.
We envision a film made very much in style of “direct documentary” with these two peasants as protagonists.
Their way of life remains exactly the same as before the accident: household chores, milking the cow, planting potatoes, harvesting the potatoes, laying in winter hay for the cow.
The future film will witness their birthdays, holidays—Easter and Christmas.
Their loneliness. And their quietude. Ivan and Yevdokiya’s world is not one of many words. During the long years everything has been talked over.
Little events: once a month the postman comes with their pensions. The vendor with bread and salt drives by in his van every two weeks.
Their house is the only inhabited one in the entire village.
All the remaining ones in the village of Lubyanka, as in all the other villages in the Zone—are abandoned and are steadily dissolving and becoming part of the natural world, like the ships that have fallen to the bottom. (The most radioactively contaminated villages were razed to the ground.)
The roads are growing narrower—spruces grow amid the crumbling asphalt on the shoulder.
The once ubiquitous Soviet monument to the soldier-liberator holding his machine-gun is falling to pieces and the layers of silver paint are peeling off like scales.
The green sign of the savings bank on the stripped, rickety building now drained of its administrative authority.
A wooden post and a door on iron hinges—all that is left of the gate.
In the twenty odd years the courtyards have become overgrown with bushes, the roofs of the houses have caved in, and foxes, raccoons and martens now live in many of the peasant huts.
In a dozen years there won’t be any people in the Zone, but there will be wolves, wild boar, elk and deer, roe and foxes, owls and cranes. The life of the animals follows the same seasonal cycle as the lives of Ivan and Yevdokiya.
In summer the wolves hunt alone; in winter they gather together in packs and hunting wild boar and roe becomes the chief means of survival.
In spring the leaders of the pack are presented with their offspring.
Foxes stand their ground living in the abandoned village huts…
Ten years ago Przewalski’s wild horses were brought here. Their offspring now dance a kind of ballet in the Zone’s fields in small groups of five or six dancers.
In spring foals join these ballet dancers.
In the early eighteenth century Chernobyl had a large Jewish population, including the founders of Hassidim’s Chernobyl dynasty.
Two graves of tzaddiqim still remaining in the abandoned town are a destination point for the Hassidim who make a pilgrimage to the graves of tzaddiqim in Ukraine.
Brickwork and an iron door protect the graves from potential vandals. They come, they pray and they leave. And the iron door is once again closed for a year.
A splash of foreign sound in a quiet world.
One day in spring hundreds of former inhabitants of all the disappearing villages travel to the Zone. According to Slavic custom, Grobki is the day when you look after the graves and honor the dead. Ivan and Yevdokiya join others at their local cemetery.
People plant flowers and clean last year’s leaves from the grave mounds.
Then they drink vodka, eat, talk and reminisce, fall silent, weep and decorate the graves with rushnyky (traditional hand embroidered cloths) and colored garlands.
These cloths and garlands will remain on the graves for the whole year, until the next Day of the Dead.
The future film is a visual meditation on how nature takes over the “emptiness” when man exits. What was a tragedy in 1986, unbiased nature turns merely into the past. After all the man who once lived in the house that now stands abandoned and the weed that now occupies that house are equal on nature’s evolutionary scales. Man has done everything to tip the scales in his favor and continues to do so. In the Zone these scales are regaining equilibrium.
Chernobyl: Paradise Regained will offer the viewer a personal connection to the Zone, where mankind is rehearsing for a possible future.
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