Synopsis
April 26, 1986. On that day, Anya and Piotr celebrate their marriage. Little Valery and his father Alexei, a physicist at the power station in Chernobyl, plant an apple tree. Nikolai, the forest warden, makes his rounds of forests. Then, an accident occurs at the power station. Insidiously, the radioactivity transforms nature. The rain is yellow, the trees turn red. Piotr, a volunteer fireman, leaves to extinguish flames, but he never returns. A few days later, the population of the area begins to evacuate. Alexei, forced to keep silent by the authorities, prefers to disappear.

Program Note
Twenty years have passed since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in April 1986, the worst-ever nuclear disaster in human history. And the word “Chernobyl” is still the byword of disaster. Land of Oblivion tries to talk about the story of “people” that has been put aside by the grave word “death”.
One spring day, Anya and Piotr are elated waiting for their forthcoming marriage, and Alexei and his young son Valero envision their bright future while planting a tree. But the nuclear disaster completely rocks their lives. Piotr goes missing after traveling to the plant to fight the fire, and Alexei, a nuclear physicist, cannot leave the radioactivity-ridden city. A decade later, just like the ruined city, those who survived have lost the energy of life. Anya has become a tour guide in Chernobyl and lives with the paradox of having to introduce the tragic memories to tourists, while Alexei cannot even take a step away from the past and hovers around the remains of the city like a ghost. The film does not talk about hope or try to draw empathy; it simply invites us to observe the people in the movie from a distance. One might take the film’ s perspective as unsatisfactory since it fails to reach any meaningful conclusion after going through the characters’ lives. But this lack of a determinate conclusion might suggest the director’s conclusion that the film cannot measure the depth of others’ wounds or reproduce a traumatic event as a complete narrative. [LEE Hyo-jeong]