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Still from Volodymyr Shevchenko’s Chernobyl: Chronicle of a Difficult Weeks (1987) courtesy of Dovzhenko Centre

Chernobyl: Chronicle of a Difficult Weeks

Ecocinema Beyond the Iron Curtain

  • Saturday, March 22, 2025
  • 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
  • East Building Auditorium
  • Films
  • In-person
  • Registration Required
  • Drop-In Registration

Join us for a post-screening conversation with co-curators Masha Shpolberg, Bard College, and Lukasz Brasiskis, e-flux and Columbia University.

The documentary Chernobyl: Chronicle of a Difficult Weeks was filmed by a team of Ukrainian filmmakers in the weeks immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. Part documentation of the clean-up effort and part essay film, it uses the unique qualities of cinema as a medium to reflect on this catastrophe of unprecedented scale. The team was aware that spending so much time in the “zone” and filming directly above the exploded fourth reactor could prove fatal yet felt a duty to do so. The director, Volodymyr Shevchenko, fought a ten-month battle against Soviet censors and succumbed to radiation sickness shortly before the film was finally released. (Chernobyl, Khronika Trudnykh Nedel, Volodymyr Shevchenko, 1987, Ukrainian with English subtitles, 35mm to digital, 54 minutes)

Preceded by Time Passes Through the City. The main protagonist of this film is time itself as it passes through Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Drawing on both the Soviet avant-garde and French cinéma verité approaches, the film peels back intersecting layers of the city’s history. The white horse wandering the streets becomes a poignant symbol of the way streets and buildings retain the memory of ages past. (Laikas Eina per Miestą, Almantas Grikevičius, 1966, Lithuanian with English subtitles, 35mm to digital, 20 minutes)

Presented in collaboration with DC’s Environmental Film Festival

Part of the film series Ecocinema Beyond the Iron Curtain.