BERLIN: "Zvizdal [Chernobyl - so far so close]"

Presented in partnership with the University of Cincinnati Center for Film and Media Studies and FotoFocus

This performance occurs at Lightborne Communications (212 E 14th St, Cincinnati, OH 45202)

1986. About 90 towns and villages around Pripyat are evacuated. The failure of an atomic experiment causes a drastic change in the lives of the inhabitants. They leave their houses never to return again.

Pétro and Nadia, a married couple born and raised in Zvizdal, refuse to be evacuated and instead stay put in their house within a village that is now a ghost town. All acquaintances have left, their plundered houses bear witness of a former liveliness. Petrified places, overgrown by nature, are given free reign.

Over the course of five years, BERLIN accompanied Pétro and Nadia through bouts of toothache, alcoholism, superstition, song and prayer. Far removed from voyeurism, Zvizdal is an intense portrait of solitude, survival, poverty, hope and love between two elderly people living with the invisible, scentless omnipresence of radiation. Blending video documentary and performance, Zvizdal incorporates three scale models of the couple’s house and property depicting three seasons. Images of these models are repeatedly interspersed in the film work projected on a large screen above them in which BERLIN effortlessly amalgamate images, conversations and observations with concrete and meta strands of reflection.

“Slowly and sensitively, a remarkable portrait is created, offering no simple answers to the questions that arise, even the central one of why Pétro and Nadia choose to stay.” —Irish Times

Duration: 60 minutes without intermission