“The consequences of the accident have not been studied, they are dark and mysterious. In the center of the Zone, as before, a city stands, but nowadays it is completely deserted, leaving out the looters. What is happening in the Zone – no one knows. The most absurd rumors are abound. Some signals come from there, as if the city is full of life, but no one is able to decipher those signals. More than one military detachment had been sent there – people just disappeared without a trace. The main characters of the movie are: a dreamy marauder (Andrii Dzhedzhula), a woman who lost her family (Iryna Novak), and an ostracized scientist (Serhii Romaniuk) – will find themselves in the unusual circumstances of the city with its own laws. Is it possible to escape from destiny? What to do when your world has changed forever?”
This is a preview of The Lost City, fantasy thriller about the Chornobyl Station and parallel worlds, as filmmakers themselves present it. Three years they have worked on the film, and now finally, on October 1, it is ready to enter the Ukrainian cinema screens. The Lost City is a film project that won the first pitching of the State Agency for Cinema and received its full budget from the state. But judging by the first trailer, which has already appeared on the Internet, the crew has put the money (almost 6 million hryvnias) to a good use. Whenever a film tries to portray law-enforcement agencies in one way or another, there is a danger that our product would slip into Russian narrative, but The Lost City avoided that. The movie rather resembles a mixture of Ukrainian realities with American aesthetics. Protagonist is a bit of a cynic and is definitely a hero in every sense of the word, going through fearlessly across the expanses of Chornobyl wearing his army boots and sunglasses, followed by two people, who were forced upon him as his companions (a classic story), and then encounters... a utopia selling a future. It seems that no one before had an idea to portray Chornobyl as a city of an unbridled happiness.
And this is certainly not Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the director did not take on such a task. This is a genuine Ukrainian thriller. “A world of predicted future – is it a brilliant invention or an ingenious crime?” the filmmakers ask. The answer is for an audience to solve.
