A filmic portrait about two people, living in a ghost town. A story about solitude and survival, the results of a failed atomic experiment.
About 90 towns and villages around Pripyat are evacuated. The failure of an atomic experiment causes a drastic change in the lives of the locals. They leave their houses never to return. They prefer to stay put in their old village, in their own house. A ghost town. All their acquaintances have left, their plundered houses bear witness to better days. Petrified places, overgrown by nature.
How does one bear years of isolation? There is the lack of electricity, of running water and heating. There are the superstitions, there is the vodka, the muttering, the cursing and praying and singing, the toothaches, the ailments of old age, the km walk to the nearest shop, the wait for someone from civilization. Zvizdal draws a portrait of solitude, survival, poverty, hope and love between two elderly people in their eighties surrounded by colourless, odourless but omnipresent radiation.
Frederik Buyckx. Press quotes 'A remarkable portrait, offering no simple answer'. The audience sits on either side of a film screen [ Each of the one hundred and eighty people who shared it with me have learned something about what our lives are essentially all about.
And it's a mesmerizing, deeply moving trip.
