Hamlet of Chernobyl

Next year it will be 20 years from Chernobyl NPP Disaster. Every adult has his own recollections of this date. As for me, I was at a holiday camp in Ukraine on that day. I remember all our group to have sudden similar symptoms: tickling throat and nausea. We accused our kitcheners then. And schools of dead fish washed ashore the lake must have been caused by jacklighters.

Protagonist of the new motion picture by "Balarusfilm" National studios has his own stury related to Chernobyl. At the moment of the accident he was in a Belarusian village later considered "death zone". He saw gray ash falling from the sky with his own eyes. Later his relatives died one after another…

Scene of the picture is laid in 2005. Protagonist Andrei Buslov suffers all imaginable kinds of misfortune: creative breakdown and symptoms of dreadful disease. Additionally, his wife is pregnant. In moral distress, Buslov is not certain he has right to bring new life. Like Hamlet, he decides rhetorical question: to be or not to be? He departs to his native contaminated village to find answer to his question. There he discovers that people still live there. They are busy with everyday cares and do not think of moving anywhere...

The motion picture directed by Sergei Sychev should not be viewed as a horror movie. It rather belongs to melodrama, most popular genre among the audience. "Father′s house" is a story about love and overcoming of moral crisis under given circumstance in relation to the miserable date. Besides, the story has a happy end. What exactly the end is, viewers will know next year only. Official release date is September 30. Some days ago picture crew did extra work and thus "celebrated" the middle of their job.

Anna Shadrina