It's 1996. Anya (Olga Kurylenko) works as a guide on a tour bus that takes people through Pripyat, a town located just 3 km from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The tourists, all of varying ages and nationalities, listen somewhat bored to Anya's descriptions of April 26, 1986, a decade earlier, when the entire region was drenched in a cold, hard rain and sinister dense smoke rose out of the power plant chimneys.
"We were told to evacuate immediately. We were told not to take out a single personal item." You can tell Anya has repeated this story so many times the meaning of it has worn thin. "Why are you still here?" asks a tourist, and Anya's answer to that is automatic: "Because this place is home to me."
That's just one of the many wrenching moments in "Land of Oblivion," which opens here hot on the heels of a new Cabinet, headed by a prime minister bent on reactivating Japan's nuclear power plants. This first feature from documentary maker Michale Boganim brings on a painful and acute sense of deja vu: We've seen something very similar to this in the wake of 3/11, and nearly two years later, the cleanup operations in Fukushima are nowhere near finished.