Olga Antimony

The film tells how, in an extremely difficult political situation — between two crises, the Berlin and the Caribbean, the Benny Goodman Orchestra arrived in the Soviet Union. For the Soviet people in 1962, it was a tremendous breakthrough both in the relationship between the countries and in the opportunity not only to hear jazz music, which was semi-forbidden in those years, but also to see and get to know real Americans.

Thirty years ago, a little girl watched her parents’ wedding, remembering the lilies in her mother’s hands. Today, she is getting married herself in Dnipro, a Ukrainian city living through years of war and air raid sirens. Katya’s father was a liquidator of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He called himself and his friends “larks” — birds that are the first to rise into the spring sky — and called his struggle to survive after the catastrophe “Chernobyl-2.” In 2022, a new catastrophe enters the lives of his wife Tanya and daughter Katya: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Combining archival footage filmed more than twenty years ago with material shot during the current war, Chernobyl-2: Life After traces how one catastrophe echoes through another — and how a family living in the shadow of Chernobyl and war continues to love, laugh, endure, and move forward.

The film tells how, in an extremely difficult political situation — between two crises, the Berlin and the Caribbean, the Benny Goodman Orchestra arrived in the Soviet Union. For the Soviet people in 1962, it was a tremendous breakthrough both in the relationship between the countries and in the opportunity not only to hear jazz music, which was semi-forbidden in those years, but also to see and get to know real Americans.

Thirty years ago, a little girl watched her parents’ wedding, remembering the lilies in her mother’s hands. Today, she is getting married herself in Dnipro, a Ukrainian city living through years of war and air raid sirens. Katya’s father was a liquidator of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He called himself and his friends “larks” — birds that are the first to rise into the spring sky — and called his struggle to survive after the catastrophe “Chernobyl-2.” In 2022, a new catastrophe enters the lives of his wife Tanya and daughter Katya: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Combining archival footage filmed more than twenty years ago with material shot during the current war, Chernobyl-2: Life After traces how one catastrophe echoes through another — and how a family living in the shadow of Chernobyl and war continues to love, laugh, endure, and move forward.