Pripyat (Chernobyl)

The city of Pripyat was once considered the finest place to live in the whole of the Soviet Union. A thoroughly modern city, it was built in 1970 to house the workers of the new Chernobyl nuclear Power plant and their families, and was once a happy home to 50,000 people. In the aftermath of the accident in April 1986, the residents were instructed to pack one suitcase and told they would be returning in three days. One thousand buses were drafted in from all across the Soviet Union to take the residents of Pripyat out of their now highly contaminated home. They never returned. 21 years later Pripyat stands empty, a ghost town deep within the exclusion zone, the last remaining Soviet city. This haunting experimental film by Irish artist Nicky Larkin takes you inside Pripyat and examines the relationship between time, nature and culture, in a city that will never be lived in again.