Verwundete Erde

La Terre Outragée will turn heads. This beautifully textured drama about the Chernobyl disaster and its long-term legacy was shot on location, giving the film a shocking sense of immediacy. The camera captures the sobering reality of the environmental catastrophe that devastated Ukraine. But the eerily vacant landscape is only a backdrop to the human cost of the tragedy, which is what director and writer Michale Boganim focuses on in her authoritative feature debut.

The film begins in pastoral reverie as a young couple drifts down a sun-dappled river, a place where boys frolic and fishermen dip their rods. Anya (Olga Kurylenko) and Piotr (Nikita Emshanov) are about to be married, but news arrives of an accident at the nuclear power plant, and Piotr, a firefighter, is summoned away from his nuptials. Soon rain begins to fall — black rain — and the disaster's full dimension starts to percolate into the consciousness of the people of Pripyat, a town only a few kilometers away from the power station.

A few years later, Anya is now a local guide for curious tourists who don radiation-proof suits and bus through the town snapping photos of a transformed world. Like many others, Anya finds herself caught between leaving and staying.

As her heroine struggles with her demons, Boganim depicts a community that, despite the dangers, refuses to leave its history behind. The residents' houses — derelict, abandoned and overgrown with weeds — nestle within an area still contaminated with too much radioactivity to be safe, but the lure of the place they call home is like a siren. Squatters move in to family houses while relatives of those killed find themselves trapped and unable to make sense of it all. The aftermath of Chernobyl is fully exposed, forcing us to imagine what a nuclear future might look like — something the people of Fukushima have only just recently contemplated.

Piers Handling

Source: http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2011/landofoblivion

I saw the movie by accident and was deeply impressed how well Michale Boganim managed to capture humanity and the tragic personal events in this movie, without even showing the events happening directly at the Chernobyl plant.

What touched me most was the connection to their hometown of some of the characters. The discord between leaving a heavily polluted placed and staying on the grounds that were their home for many years.

The interlink of the stories of the characters in the movie are very well done, too and are sometimes just seconds short, which rather reflects real life than some pathetic happy get- together of characters at the end of most Hollywood movies.

There is a point where drama is so severe that a film becomes something else entirely. Even as this one maintains a pointedly low-key tone, the first portion of the runtime in particular, a little less than half, is so tragic as to be horrifying as we, the audience, know well the full extent of events that the characters do not. The the remainder, adopting another perspective on Chernobyl, is characterized by a haunting emptiness as it explores life in the shadow of the disaster. Plenty of features and TV shows have been made in, around, or about Pripyat, and I hardly claim to have seen them all, yet this rendition is underhandedly grim with its ruminations on the lasting effects the event beyond the radiation. It's perhaps not the most essential and overall captivating picture on the topic, but 'Land of oblivion' is nonetheless well made and roundly engaging.

It's to the credit of the cast - not least Olga Kurylenko, given the most time on-screen - that they slip so naturally into their roles, illustrating quiet nuance as they each seem to embody that same unspoken wistful sorrow. Actually, it may be the cast that most readily stands out here; inasmuch as the picture follows discrete story threads by way of a few characters, in the grand scheme of things these seem like small garnishes amidst footage that largely shows us the same desolation of the exclusion zone that viewers are already well familiar with from photo and video records. The characters, themes, and narrative beats are generally presented so nonchalantly that they easily get overshadowed by the imagery we know well. My first impulse is to say that this is a sad mark against the feature and its creatives, that its particulars are thusly drowned out. Then again, might this not be a deliberate choice, and ingenious furtherance of the Big Ideas here? After all, while the events of April 1986 continue to have an impact on people in real life, the world at large has moved on - so is it not appropriate for the stories of these fictional characters, specifically the focus of 'Land of oblivion,' to themselves be quietly consigned to... well, "oblivion?" Time waits for no one, and every life that is so important in and of itself will one day be completely forgotten; if this doesn't dovetail horribly into a catastrophe like Chernobyl, of profound human cost, then nothing does.

Putting all this aside - if not perfect, I think this is fantastic. All those details coming to us from behind the scenes are swell, including production design, art direction, effects, costume design, and hair and makeup. I admire Antoine Héberlé's cinematography, and Michale Boganim's direction. Apart from the cast, though, it's the writing that stands out the most. The characters presented to us feel painfully real, not least as they continue to struggle with the ramifications of their connections to Chernobyl beyond the immediate incident. While 'Land of oblivion' comes out swinging in its first forty minutes or so, it continues to dig in its claws more subtly thereafter, with each plot thread carrying its own soft vibrancy that I think resonates more than is at first readily evident. And to that point, all aspects of the screenplay (narrative, characters, dialogue, scene writing) bear a graceful fluidity such that distinguishing one from another is a moot point after a while; disentangling them is fruitless. Maybe more than anything else I think that speaks very well to the strength of the feature.

As a matter of personal preference this won't appeal to everyone, and for as much as I like it, I don't think it really amounts to a must-see in any especial manner. I don't even know that I'd say that it quite matched my expectations. One could him and haw about the details all day long, however, and when all is said and done the fact remains that 'Land of oblivion' is a strong, engrossing drama, defined primarily by its capable cast and writing. If you have the opportunity to watch, this is well worth your time.

If someone has read Svetlana Alexievich book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" /"Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future" , readers probably find this movie as complex and breath-taking as those real eyewitness, post-traumatic stories.

People who are moving to a different place greatly miss all the memories and people, related to a certain place, certain environment. Its a drama of people who suddenly had no choice but move and therefore in some point in their lives wanting to search back for their inner state of comfort and happiness.

Main character Anya who lost her husband in her wedding day tries to re-live her possible life with another man, living near the Zone and working in the Pripyat city as a guide. She understands that trying to re-live her possible life track as if 1986 wouldn't existed doesn't make her happier. She feels lost and unsteady for making new choices.

There is also a story line of a father and kid who got seperated by the tragic events of 1986. That story line portrays endless guilt that the father couldn't resolve during the next decade. He simply dissapeared from his wife and childs life, probably because of fearing to face consequences of accident or possible trial. The kid, however is trying to find him.

In short words, movie shows how environmental catastrophe could impact lives of ordinary people.

The Chernobyl disaster, during and 10 years after the event, told as a human-drama movie.

The "during" part is interesting though not entirely compelling - you don't see any of the attempts to combat the disaster and hardly see the reactor. Interesting because you see the effect on the general population.

The "10 years after" part is dull. The characters are uninteresting and the plot goes nowhere.

Overall, doesn't really work - it would have been better if this was a straightforward documentary, rather than an attempted drama.