Zvizdal

1986. About ninety towns and villages around the Ukrainian city of Pripyat — just across the border from Chernobyl — are evacuated. The failure of a nuclear experiment drastically changes the lives of the locals. They leave their homes, never to return.

Pétro and Nadia, a married couple of then sixty-year-olds who were born and raised in Zvizdal, refuse to be evacuated. 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.

Between 2011 and 2016 BERLIN - together with journalist Cathy Blisson - follows Pétro and Nadia in an effort to portray the evolution of their story over the years. 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 twenty kilometre walk to the nearest shop, the wait for someone from civilisation.

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.