Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (2022) on Netflix

Plot summary

Cameras at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Soviet Ukraine recorded the hours, days and months that followed the April 1986 explosion, and the men holding them stayed beside the liquidators sent in to make the reactor safe. Footage unseen in the West for decades is joined by new audio interviews with people who were present, among them Lyudmila Ihnatenko, a pregnant woman whose firefighter husband was among the first responders. The official response runs through the accounts, from the early silence about what had happened to public statements that played down its scale. The recordings surfaced only recently after a long search through archives in Ukraine and Russia.