BERLIN
Under 30 years old 5€
Under 18 years old 3€
In Ukranian with Portuguese and English surtitles
Sinopsis
A cinematic portrait of two people who live in a ghost town. A story about loneliness and survival, as a consequence of the results of a failed atomic experiment.
In 1986, after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, roughly 90 towns and villages around Pripyat were evacuated. 350,000 inhabitants abandoned their houses forever.
Pétro and Nadia, a couple in their sixties, born and bred in Zvizdal, refuse to be evacuated, preferring to stay in their home in what has become a ghost town. Everyone has left, all their friends and acquaintances. The ransacked houses testify to the vitality of the past. Now they are petrified places, overrun by nature. Their extreme lives provide them with the raw material for this show-installation-documentary.
Between 2011 and 2016, BERLIN requested special licences and took all the necessary precautions to visit Pétro and Nadia in the radioactive exclusion zone of Chernobyl, in an effort to portray the evolution of its history over the years. How is it possible to bear so many years of isolation? Why does someone insist on living forever in self-imposed exile, in a place that was transformed into a repository of nuclear fuel, isolated from all forms of social contact, and under the invisible, but real threat of radioactivity? There is no running water, no electricity, no telephone or post, but there are superstitions, vodka, personal beliefs, swearing, singing, toothache and the problems that come with old age. How can one live with just one other person as company, a cow, an old horse, a cat, a dog and some hens?
Zvizdal takes us through the flow of the seasons and provides us with a portrait of loneliness, survival, poverty, hope and love between two people, now aged over eighty, who live surrounded by colourless, odourless, but omnipresent radiation. Their story is told in theatre and film on a large screen, with two sides and three rotating scale models that become our window onto the small world of this couple.
