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.”
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