The Battle of Chernobyl

The Battle of Chernobyl (La Bataille de Tchernobyl, 2007) is a French documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director Thomas Johnson reconstructs the hours after the fourth reactor blew on the night of April 26 — pulling from video archives, survivor accounts and the photographs of Igor Kostin.

What the film tracks is the human cost, not the abstract one. Roughly half a million firemen, miners and military pilots were sent into the zone to smother the radiation by hand and pour a concrete shell over the wrecked reactor. Step by step it lays out how the Soviet state raced to prevent a second blast that could have poisoned half of Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev and former IAEA inspector Hans Blix are among the voices on camera.

Over 94 minutes it became a reference point for how the disaster is remembered, told without the gloss of the official bulletins. Heavy, plainspoken, and worth your time if you want to grasp what really happened behind the propaganda. Stream The Battle of Chernobyl (2007) online on iFILM.