« La Zone » : a transmedia documentary on the Chernobyl catastrophe
by Ana Vasile, published on 28.04.2011
This multiplatform project proposes a new point of view on the Chernobyl catastrophe. 25 years after, « La Zone » ravished by the radiations is uncovering itself through its inhabitants’ stories, gathered by two journalists through their journeys spread throughout ten years.
Directed by Guillaume Herbaut and Bruno Masi and produced by Agat Films & Cie and lemonde.fr, “La Zone” unfolds its story through a web documentary (broadcasted on the Le Monde newspaper’s website), an interactive installation at the Parisian art gallery Gaîté Lyrique and a book edited by Naïve, on the 25 anniversary of Chernobyl catastrophe.
“We have discovered the abandoned villages from the forbidden zone : that infinite space similar to The Reunion Island, surrounded by barbed wire and punctuated by graveyards where the corpses of contaminated cars pile up. During ten years, we went back to this region, magnetized by its stakes : the incarnation at a big scale of a disintegrating world, with no point of reference flowing with the instinct, inhabited by fear of extermination, eaten by his own social and economical decay.” witnessed the authors.
A web documentary
A gallery made by stories and portraits. The men and women living there, orbit around the 4th reactor in Chernobyl. That restricted area is still one of the most dangerous areas on Earth, a self-contained world eaten away by the radioactivity, this invisible danger… intangible, odorless but always present, a land inhabited by wolves, surveyed by smugglers and state police that will not twitch before pointing up their guns. A strong and complex tie is woven between this zone and the men and women that inhabit or adventure to cross it. The documentary is online on the Monde’s website
A multimedia installation
The viewer’s physical experience at the forbidden zone. By entering a grey cube the viewer experiences the zone on four walls. The system mixing video and photography is proposing a certain immersion into the Chernobyl area, the 450 km zone around the fourth reactor. From the 26th April to the 10th May 2011 at the Gaîté Lyrique (Paris)
A book
The book co-edited by Naïve and Gaîté Lyrique is mixing Guillaume Herbaut’s pictures with Bruno Masi’s texts and covers all the five trips that allowed these two journalists to create their documentary, from October 2009 until November 2010. Following two stories with different rhythms, this book is inviting the reader to submerge to the zone’s everyday life. Available starting with the 26th April at Gaîté Lyrique (Paris)
A complementary article is available on WebTelevisionObserver website.
