Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield St | reviews, news & interviews
Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield St
Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield St
Walk through Chernobyl: a visual reinterpretation of an idealised Soviet documentary from 1986.
Monday, 15 March 2010

An abandoned classroom in a school in ChernobylPhoto by Hana Vojackova
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants were evacuated after two days. Hana Vojackova, a Czech photographer and film-maker working in London, was also five years old at the time of the accident. Last November, she visited Chernobyl to tell a story about a story in danger of being forgotten.
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants were evacuated after two days. Hana Vojackova, a Czech photographer and film-maker working in London, was also five years old at the time of the accident. Last November, she visited Chernobyl to tell a story about a story in danger of being forgotten.
He carried a gun at all times to protect her from the wolves now inhabiting the city, but not a Geiger counter to protect her from the pockets of high radiation
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