animated, PL/SK, planned premiere: 2026

It was at night of April 25, 1986 that the explosion, that destroyed the reactor of Unit 4 of Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant, also destroyed the lives and health of an unknown number of people in the former Soviet Union and not only there. The consequences of this tragedy were more tragic because the Soviet authorities took advantage of the fact that radiation seems quite safe at first sight. You do not see it, you do not feel it and, at first, you do not even notice how harmful it is to you. Many people were therefore exposed without knowing it and they received large doses of radiation. But the people may not have received it at all! They didn’t have to, because they were not people who were directly in the plant or in the immediate vicinity of the plant at the time of the explosion. They were people who came into contact with the contaminated material later, often under quite strange circumstances and always quite unnecessarily. When a disaster occurs in a totalitarian state, the attempt to cover up its consequences leads to another disaster, that is equally or even more dangerous and lasts years or even decades.

The film Once There Was a Town… is a surreal tale of a radioactive sausage and a several-metres-high mountain of contaminated wool, which the director watches while riding an old, crumbling Ferris wheel in the centre of Pripyat – an abandoned town. It’s an animated documentary about immense human stupidity and the consequences of strange political decisions that most affect the lives of people who were powerless against the force of those decisions.

Animated documentary by Joanna Kozuch.  

The development of this film was supported by Slovak Audiovisual Fund.