Visceral horrors … an image shot at tremendous risk during the clean-up operation after the accident in 1986. Wooden grave markers in an irradiated forest. Searing footage of injuries and mutations to humans and animals. A clean-up helicopter crashing to the ground over the explosion site. Via a wealth of sources – national archives, propaganda films, collapsed Soviet documentary studios, western news reports, children and soldiers who happened to have video cameras at the time – he began to piece together a blistering documentary that draws a straight line from the USSR’s attempts to play down the disaster to the fall of the Soviet Union itself.Īlthough Chernobyl is one of those historical punctuation points on which everyone thinks they have a decent overview, not least due to Sky’s recent drama series, The Lost Tapes is studded with moments of footage so extraordinary that you are unlikely to forget them. It was so chilling.” Nevertheless, the existence of this footage spurred him to seek out more. “Then you start to see these white flashes on the film because of the insanely high level of radiation. “You can see mothers pushing babies around and kids playing football in the sand,” says Jones. Despite the fact that the worst nuclear disaster in history had happened down the road hours earlier, releasing 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb, the footage showed residents milling about as if nothing had happened. “It referenced footage that was shot in Pripyat the weekend after the accident,” he says. “But completely fascinating.” One contained a footnote that caught his eye. The seed of the documentary was planted when Jones read two books on the disaster during lockdown – “Not good for my mental state,” he says in retrospect. “An authoritarian regime was lying about it, and Chinese citizens were starting to voice their disquiet publicly.” “I was interested in the idea that this invisible enemy was threatening us,” he says. Like Chernobyl, the early days of the pandemic were marked with mysterious illnesses that the local government attempted to keep a lid on. “I initially thought the relevance was Covid,” he says. Indeed, the film-maker James Jones had a different historical event in mind when he started work on it two years ago. Obviously, this timeliness was never the intention. That it comes out now – just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including an attack on the Chernobyl site itself – makes it as unmissable as it is harrowing.
#The lost tapes episodes archive
H ad it been released at any point in the past few years, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes would have been an important documentary a feature-length blend of audio interviews and largely unseen archive footage that puts the 1986 disaster into horrifying new perspective.
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