Stalking Chernobyl: Exploration After Apocalypse
Ukraine, United States, Bulgaria, Slovakia 2020
Directed by Iara Lee, documentary, 58 min, eng subtitles, 16+
With Aleksey Moskalenko, Alexander Esaulov, Alexandr Kupnyi, Anton Fedorko, Anton Yuhimenko
Stalking Chernobyl: Exploration After Apocalypse is a documentary directed by Iara Lee (Culture of Resistance Films), examining the underground culture of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Three decades after the world’s most infamous nuclear disaster, nature has returned to the site in the absence of humans. In the meantime, illegal hiking adventurers known as "stalkers", extreme sports aficionados, artists and tour companies have begun to explore anew the mysterious, ghostly, post-apocalyptic landscape. According to National Geographic, the stalkers enter the exclusion zone "cloaked in darkness and camouflage" and "navigate miles of irradiated forest, sleep in abandoned villages, and watch the sunrise unfurl over the town of Pripyat's crumbling Brezhnev baroque rooftops."
Stalking Chernobyl is dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky whose “Stalker” (based on Strugatsky Brothers’ ‘Roadside Picnic’), interestingly, was made 7 years before the Chernobyl disaster.