On 26 April 1986, reactor no.‍4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded. On the fourtieth anniversary the ACF's CineClub remembers this tragedy for the human and natural world with the screening of Nikolaus Geyrhalter's award-winning documentary Pripyat.

Geyrhalter explores Chornobyl’s ‘zone of alienation’, a 30-km restricted zone erected around the nuclear power plant from where 116,000 people were evacuated. The film is a portrait of a ghost town – abandoned since 1986 – and the people who live and work there.

In striking black and white cinematography Geyrhalter surveys the wilderness, guided by the few farmers, guards, reactor controllers and ‘autonomous returnees’, who operate within this architecture of exclusion. What is life like for these people, a life with the invisible and incomprehensible danger of radioactivity? How do they deal with the aftereffects of an accident which is claimed to be statistically improbable? Four protagonists tell their stories and provide a look at everyday life in “their“ zone.

Austria, 1999, 100 mins, Russian and Ukrainian with English subtitles, Dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter.