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Our third trip to film in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone was different because of our expanded crew. Due to a generous grant from the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA)/Mary V. Beck Chornobyl Fund added on to our previous donations, we were able to hire a professional film crew and obtain much needed high-tech equipment. Our crew consisted of six people who were divided into two separate units: the Kyiv Unit, and the Chornobyl Unit.

The Kyiv Unit included Nataliya Kubishyn, translator and researcher, and Noah DeBonis, intern and researcher. They remained in Kyiv during the entire trip and sorted through archival footage, news stories, videos, etc.

The Chornobyl Unit consisted of co-director and cinematographer Peter Mychalcewycz, sound technician Kristian Borysevicz, gaffer Russell Burger, and myself as the producer, co-director and still photographer.

Here are some highlights of our adventures taken from my travel diary while filming inside the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone:


…Another bitter cold January winter in Ukraine. This time we had snow which wasn’t at all the case during our visit in 2008—bitter, evil, wind-blasting cold yes, but no snow that year. It’s as though Did Moroz (Old Man Frost) wanted to make it up to us by shrouding the entire country in relentless snow. We were told that there were consistent snowstorms several weeks before our arrival which were evident in Kyiv and certainly within the isolated Chornobyl villages which had yet to see a plow’s blade slicing through the mounds of packed, hard, turning-to-ice snow.

The hour and a half drive from Kyiv to Chornobyl is almost pleasant if one forgets where one is going—the forests are still prevalent everywhere in the Zone, even though the tree branches were encased in ice, some odd buds emerging prematurely in spite of its frozen prisons and rooted in at least four feet of snow. The deceptive beauty of the crystalline forests we passed by en route to the villages was a warning that we were going to have some major challenges getting through to the women we wanted to film. We were particularly eager to return to the irradiated village of Opachychi where we met and filmed the elderly women in 2007 and 2008…

…The roads were alarmingly icy and slushy, and despite our intrepid driver’s uncanny ability to slalom his hefty Volkswagen bus onward over the treacherous roads, we were not sure if we could reach the women in their village. On our first attempt to Opachychi, we had to turn back because the snow drifts were too high even on foot. This was a worrisome concern because if we weren’t able to reach them, then neither did the car that delivers their groceries. We had to turn back and Denys, our English speaking Chornobyl guide, suggested we try another village closer to the town of Chornobyl which was more (he thought) accessible…

…The town of Chornobyl resembled a stark ghost town and seemed bleaker than I remembered. Few people walked around mostly because we were between holidays and no one seriously thought to return to work. Who could blame them given the numbing cold and wolves lurking nearby. “We had a wolf attack last week,” Denys confided. “A dog was killed in the town.” Later, when we attempted to walk in the knee-deep snow drifts of Opachychi, Denys pointed out wolf tracks in the snow—huge canine paws that may have been mutant. Here is where a filmmaker reveals a divided mind: on the one hand, it would’ve been exciting to meet a wolf or two for the film. How dramatic and thrilling! Certainly great for filmic purposes, shouted my filmmaker alter ego. But on the other hand, the practical, cowardly and coddled self-preservationist kicks in, and I decided that I would prefer not to see them after all, at least not up close and nose to nose…


But we did see horses! Oh, the elusive Przewalski herd that roam wild throughout the Zone! We were on the search for them on our previous trip, and almost saw them darting in the forests. Now they were really there! Beautiful and haughty while grazing beneath the snows in an open meadow. We stopped the van and filmed them. They watched us and didn’t skitter away while we set up our equipment. In person (or in equine, I guess), I was amazed at how small and mule-like they appeared—short and stout and with dark butterfly nostrils on their snouts. “From Mongolia,” Denys said. “They were an experiment. Brought in after the nuclear accident. They were supposed to eat a special grass and they would defecate out the radiation.” I wasn’t sure if Denys was joking. “It was strange experiment,” Denys said in all seriousness. “It didn’t work.”


…If we couldn’t see the women that day, then we needed to film the infamously damaged Nuclear Reactor #4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant that exploded on April 26, 1986. I did not personally want to go, having gone before and hating the sight of it then, but the behemoth couldn’t be avoided. At least the roads were a bit better for some odd reason. Maybe the radiation still seeping from the rotting sarcophagus that is supposedly encapsulating the gaping hole where the reactor’s roof blew off had melted away some of the snow.

There seemed to be no one else at the plant except for another car in front of ours car that swished its way through the winding road, past the plant’s cooling lake and somehow landed in front of the ominous Reactor Number 4 before scuttling away as though it was frightened off by the hulking beast.


We positioned ourselves as close to the reactor site as was allowed. Denys took out his dosimeter for us to film the numbers clicking quickly from 30 to 135 micro-roentgens in seconds. “Actually,” he said, “there is more radioactivity near the road, where the trees are.” This proved to be true when we filmed Denis and his dosimeter clicking near a clump of bent birches near the plant’s exit—up to 400 micro-roentgens! “But in summer, the radiation is two, three times higher,” he said. Cold comfort in the cold.


We tried again to reach the women in Opchychi. Conditions worsened over the night although I was elated to see it rain instead of snow. “That’s good, right” I asked Denys basing my naïve, very limited meteorological experience from Vermont winters. I thought the rain would be helpful in disintegrating the snows. “No. Bad,” Denys said. “Roads are worse today.” We bought food anyway for the women as an optimistic gesture since we were still intent on seeing them. I also wished I had brought along that lovely bottle of cognac I saw at the general store in the town of Chornobyl because the air was frigid and our van was fishtailing more than it had, and I did not care to think about it and us being stuck somewhere on a very remote, inhospitable, no-cell-phone-access zone in the Zone. Next thing you know, there we are spending the night stranded with wolves and radiation too. Although the wolves seemed more dangerous.

We forged onward…

TO BE CONTINUED…

(© Copyright Irene Zabytko, 2010)

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