Capsule review: Zvizdal (Chernobyl -So Far So Close)

Antwerp’s collective, BERLIN (artists Bart Baele, Yve Degryse and Caroline Rochlitz), created Zvizdal (Chernobyl -So Far So Close) as part of a series called Holocene and presented this work at the Vancouver PuSh Festival January 31-February 2, 2019. Through technology and art, BERLIN explores solitude, stoicism, and survival. This documentary style film follows sixty-year-old couple, Pétroand Nadia, the only two living in Zvizdal, Chernobyl twenty-five years after it was evacuated in 1986. Alone in this isolated zone, the two are very self-sufficient living on their large homestead with dogs, chickens, a cow, and a horse. In BERLIN’s signature interdisciplinary style, Zvizdal demonstrates the struggle and hardship of surviving in an irradiated zone. 

The film’s perspective is dictated by the couple’s insistence that the cameras, considered bad luck, remain outside the homestead. By filming exclusively outdoors the scenes are repetitive and support the monotony and grind that define the couple’s existence.  Three seasonal models of the homestead, maquettes, are situated below the film. The documentary alternates between recorded footage and live footage of these maquettes. This additional interdisciplinary element displaces the focus between realities and fractures the narrative. 

Duration and endurance are emphasized with long takes giving the audience insight into the couple’s physical challenges with activities of daily living and the execution of mundane tasks. With gnarled arthritic hands Pétroharvests food from their garden, navigating with a cane Nadia hobbles, her leg looking increasingly uncomfortable and wrong.  As the film unfolds little information is given to explain the details of Pétroand Nadia’s self-imposed circumstance. A personal battle with ailments, nature and isolation Zvizdal is a very real depiction of what appears to be an incredibly difficult existence.