La Bataille de Tchernobyl
Thomas Johnson
2006 - 94 min - Beta numérique - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

At 1:24 am on April 26, 1986, a rainbow-colored flame shot some 3,000 feet up into the nighttime Ukrainian sky.
The fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant of Chernobyl had just exploded. The worst nuclear accident in history had just taken place. Apart from the extent of the damages caused by the first explosion, it unleashed a redoubtable chain reaction that threatened to provoke a second nuclear explosion, ten times more powerful than Hiroshima.
It was the start of an incredible race against time. Eight months of phenomenal intensity, which the survivors are not ready to forget.
The film is made up of the testimonies of the main political and scientific witnesses and the account of a photographer who flew over the site in an army helicopter just hours after the explosion. This film reconstructs an unrelenting battle against an invisible, particularly devastating enemy, one which for the first time exposed global civil society to a nuclear danger of great magnitude.