When she hears the phrase "a sense of home," filmmaker Michale Boganim always endures a wave of sadness. "Home can mean a whole lot of things, but to me it has connotations of displacement and loss," she tells The Japan Times. "I come from a family that was always moving around, and even as we were moving, I'd be wondering what a real home was, and about laying down roots. It's a theme I'll always be exploring."
Just as Boganim's last film, the 2004 documentary "Odessa ... Odessa!," had been about Jewish communities and their values becoming obsolete, her latest, "Land of Oblivion," is about an entire region shutting down, gathering dust and sinking into decay. It's also a memorial testament to life in Pripyat, drenched in golden sunshine with a lush forest spreading right into the horizon and people going about their normal existences, before the disaster at Chernobyl changed that picture forever and the word "meltdown" became part of the global vocabulary.
When Boganim started the project, 3/11 had not yet happened, and she was aware that "most people in the world didn't even know where Chernobyl is located on the map." But her mother was from Ukraine, and Boganim was familiar with Pripyat, host town to the nuclear plant. "I wanted to show what Pripyat is like (now), which is a real ghost town. Otherwise no one will know what happened, or even care."