Meltdown in Chernobyl Video
These three films set the official account of Chernobyl against what the camera and its witnesses actually found. Shevchenko's 1986 on-site chronicle opens with Gorbachev denouncing Western "lies," then moves so close to the reactor that gamma radiation streaks the film stock itself—the medium recording what the message denied; the director was dead within ten months. Sergiyenko returned a year later for a film of mourning, letting rural Ukrainian women recount the night-shift son never recovered and the evacuation promised to last only days. Belikov's feature Disintegration dramatizes the same denial, as a couple flee their wedding toward the catastrophe the bureaucracy refuses to name.
Shevchenko: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks / Чернобыль. Хроника трудных недель (1986)
Sergiyenko: The Bell Tolls for Chernobyl / Колокол Чернобыля (1987)