Lonely Voices

An Atonal commissioned video work from acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang was shot on-site in Chernobyl, northern Ukraine. The work focuses on Maria – in her 50s when the nuclear disaster occurred in Chernobyl. As her village was within 30 kilometres of the restricted area, she and her neighbours were forbidden to live in their own homes and instead sent to far away places. Maria along with several sisters secretly returned to their village to live a self-sufficient life. When Liang met Maria, she was over eighty years old, and she was left alone in the village. The sisters who had secretly returned with her had died. He re-edited the contents of the interviews with the characters in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, and created a situation in which the inner echo of the elderly shows the deep pain and irreparable trauma to the human race caused by nuclear tragedy.