In the Chernobyl âDead Zoneâ or âExclusion Zone,â the filmâs central characters - Hanna Zavorotnya (80), Valentyna Ivanivna (72), and Maria Shovkuta (85) - are the last survivors of a community of âself settlersâ who refused to leave their ancestral homes after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. âShoot me and dig the grave,â Hanna told a soldier who tried to evacuate her, âotherwise Iâm staying.â Sheâd survived Stalinâs famines and Nazi atrocities on her motherland - she wasnât going to flee an âinvisible enemy.â Over the course of a year, the film follows the womenâs journeys, and those of visitors, including: the chief of an environmental testing team, a postal worker making her rounds, a 23-year-old female Chernobyl official, a science journalist, and a group of toxic thrill-seekers called âStalkersâ who break into the Zone illegally for radiation thrills. The film captures extraordinary locations and moments, from radiation spikes just feet from âthe sarcophagusâ of nuclear reactor No. 4, to the Zoneâs sole remaining religious ceremony - Easter midnight mass in the decrepit Chernobyl church. The filmâs characters and observational style reveal seemingly conflicting layers of a complicated story: Chernobyl is the ancestral home of a community with deep and old roots â but the contaminants will survive far longer than the regionâs culture; the Zone is toxic, yet full of life; the story is steeped in a patriarchal post-Soviet environment, yet is rife with powerful âgrandmothers.â How do all of these realities live together? This portrait of a community tells a remarkable tale about the pull of home, the healing power of shaping one's own destiny and the subjective nature of risk.