Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes
Sky

In 1972, the town of Chernobyl on the Belarusian/Ukrainian border was hailed as an “atomic city”, a Utopia for workers’ families living under the beneficent glow of the world’s largest nuclear reactor. Propaganda footage from the period showed a white-coated administrator beaming in front of the new maternity hospital built to provide for all the happy Chernobyl babies promised to the Soviet empire. “The peaceful atom,” said the narrator on the film, “can provide love, peace and joy on the earth.”

Fifty years later, Chernobyl (pictured, reactor 4) and the nearby residential area of Pripyat are ghost towns, emptied in 1986 by the biggest nuclear meltdown in history. In Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (28 February), director James Jones’ gripping, disturbing documentary unearthed tapes tell a terrifying story not only of radiation catastrophe but of lies, fear and exploitation. And of course it is given an extra twist this week with reports that the Chernobyl site was one of the first places seized as the Russian army invaded Ukraine.