25 Years After Chernobyl

Each year, Higashi-Nakano art house cinema Pole-Pole marks the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster by screening a selection of nuclear-themed films. Given the understandable interest in all things atomic at the moment (and, lest we forget, that 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl), they're pulling out the stops this time around. The two-week program consists mostly of documentaries, with work by filmmakers including Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Masato Koike, Seiichi Motohashi and Hitomi Kamanaka – most of whom will also appear at special 'teach-in' talk events. Pole-Pole well be dusting off a couple of Soviet-era classics, too. Mikhail Romm's Nine Days of One Year (1962) offered audiences a rare insight into nuclear physics research, telling the story of a young researcher who is exposed to a potentially deadly dose of radiation. Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) is a far more ambiguous work, but its vision of a futuristic wasteland, The Zone, appears to foreshadow the aftermath of Chernobyl.