On 23 April 2016 at London’s Frontline Club we will be commemorating the tragedy with a range of events. There will be film-screenings, readings by renowned film actress Anamaria Marinca from Nobel Prize-Winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, and an evening-panel of experts on Chornobyl and Ukraine – those who grew up with the tragedy or covered it in the ensuing years. Throughout, we will be raising the central question: was the explosion at Reactor Number 4 an unmitigated tragedy or has Chornobyl – so long a byword for catastrophe and human error – turned out finally to be a story of hope?

Order of the Day: 

2:30 pm - Speeches.

Welcoming word by Natalia Galibarenko, Ambassador of Ukraine, and Robin Ashenden, producer.

2:45 pm - FILM SCREENING: Chernobyl: Surviving Disaster (Nick Murphy, BBC, 2006). 

The hard-hitting 2006 BBC docu-drama about the Chornobyl Disaster and the subsequent Kremlin cover-up of its real causes, told through the experience of Valerey Legasov, the chief investigator who – out of guilt over the enforced omissions of his final report – took his own life on the second anniversary of the explosion. Directed by Nick Murphy (The Awakening, 2011) and with a superb central performance by Ade Edmondson (The Young Ones, War & Peace).  

4 pm - FILM SCREENING: Babushkas of Chernobyl (Morris & Bogart, 2015) 

Holly Morris and Ann Bogart’s life-affirming documentary about a community of elderly women who have chosen to defy the authorities and to persevere in inhabiting – with optimism and solidarity – the Exclusion Zone around Reactor Number 4.  ‘…a remarkable tale about the pull of home, the healing power of shaping one’s destiny and the subjective nature of risk’ –  Winner at Woodstock and Los Angeles Film Festivals.

6 pm - Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, read by actress Anamaria Marinca, with music by Alina Bzhezhinska 

The Chornobyl Disaster produced a crop of books, but towering above all of them is Nobel-Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, a collection of verbatim texts taken from interviews with survivors and due for republication as Chernobyl Prayer on April 21 2016. Here we present the extract ‘A Solitary Human Voice’ read by award-winning Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca (best known for new wave Romanian classic 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days). Musical interludes by Ukrainian Harpist Alina Bzhezhinska.

 

 

 

Nobel Prize Winner Svetlana Alexievich

 
Actress Anamaria Marinca, Harpist Alina Bzhezhinska                                                                                                           

7:30 pm - PANEL DISCUSSION: ‘CHORNOBYL 30 YEARS ON’ 

PANELLISTS:

Panellists include author and Ukrainian specialist Anna Reid, documentary-maker (and former Pripyat resident) Alla Kravchuk, EBRD nuclear-specialist Balthasar Lindauer, and radiation health-specialist Professor Geraldine Thomas (Imperial College).

 
Anna Reid

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Tickets are available from Eventbrite below.

Written By

Robin Ashenden

Robin Ashenden has been living and working in Central and Eastern Europe for the better part of 20 years, and writing about it - for magazines like Sunday Times Travel, Wanderlust and Waitrose Food Illustrated - for the better part of a decade. He has an MA in Travel Writing about the Soviet Union, and in 2009 was the recipient of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Writers' Grant, to travel in and write about the post-communist countries of Central Europe.