La bataille de Tchernobyl

This French documentary, The Battle of Chernobyl" should have been shown much more world wide, and thanks to Netflix it's taken up again 16 years later.

This tells more than ever the horror show that the Chernobyl nuclear factory blast both on those who were set to stop the catastrophe and the innocent.

There were done so many mistakes that it'a baffling, but it also told Gorbachev, which is interviewed in this movie, that the Soviet political system had failed.

A lot of people unknowingly risked their lives to avoid a 3-5 megatonn nuclear blast that could annihilate all of Europe.

The movie is telling the horrific story, some of the eyewitnesses, 2.500 died of radiation following illnesses before they were 40.

Thanks to Netflix to dig this up again. It deserves a huge audience.

If ever there was a film that documented the horrors of nuclear weapons "The Battle Of Chernobyl" is surely it. What makes this film so potent are the images: photos yes, but also a surprising number of retro news and secret camera footage from the nuclear power plant site and surrounding area, as the catastrophe unfolded in April of 1986, in Ukraine.

One of the most haunting components here is the story of Pripyat, a bustling city of almost fifty thousand people in 1986; everyone had to be evacuated. And none of the residents ever returned to live there; the structures remain, but Pripyat is now a ghost town, as are hundreds of small villages in the region, thirty years after the nuclear explosion.

One of the big problems with radioactive material is that not only can it be lethal to humans, but it is also invisible, and it remains for a very long time. This film documents the government's secrecy and lies in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy and in later years, and then the denial that now exists among people living in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus that bore the brunt of the radiation fallout.

In addition to the images, a narrator (Tim Birkett) describes the events; interviews include comments by Gorbachev and Hans Blix, along with Soviet technical experts and medical personnel that dealt firsthand with the disaster.

The Chernobyl apocalypse continues ten years after this film was released. People in Ukraine and Belarus, and even in parts of Western Europe, are still exposed to some radiation. Mercifully, in November, 2016, a giant arched shelter, decades in the making, was slid into place over the original, hastily built, cement and steel sarcophagus, to more adequately contain the still leaking radiation at the plant site.

Yet, for several hundreds more years at least, a one thousand square mile area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant will be off-limits to human habitation, a no-mans land of invisible but deadly radioactivity.

The suffering in this documentary makes you shutter. The people sacrificed their very lives to stop a horrible disaster. I wish I could get this on DVD.

One of the best documentaries I've ever seen. I can't believe it has only one review. Trust me, this is absolutely a must see. especially for new generations. They need to understand what we risked with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster! The whole Europe could have become inhabitable!

The documentary contains rare original footage, and interviews with the people were there in the days of the disaster. The people that contribute, with their heroic sacrifices, to avoid the worst human catastrophe in our history. Absolutely terrifying to discover what we risked, and the fact that, at the times (I live in Italy) we were told almost nothing about the true risks.