As part of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), running from 10 to 20 September, there will be a screening of the Canadian-Ukrainian documentary film Chornobyl-2: Life After by Canadian director of Ukrainian heritage Olha Antimoni. This was stated on the TIFF website.
The screening will take place on 15 September at the TIFF Lightbox cultural centre as part of TIFF Market Screenings (a market screening), which involves presenting films to an industry audience, including distributors and buyers.
According to the synopsis, the film shows how, 30 years ago, a little girl named Katya watched her parents’ wedding. Today, she is getting married herself in Dnipro, a city that has lived for years under the conditions of war and air-raid alerts. Her father was a clean-up worker at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. He called himself and his friends “larks”, and the struggle to survive afterwards “Chornobyl-2”. In 2022, a new tragedy struck his family — Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The film combines archival footage from 20 years ago with material shot during the Great War. It aims to trace how one catastrophe echoes through another, and how the family, despite the Chornobyl disaster in the past and the war today, continues to love, laugh, overcome hardship and move forward.
About Olha Antimoni:
- a Canadian director of Ukrainian heritage;
- co-director of the documentary film Virskyy. Dance of Freedom about Ukrainian choreographer Pavlo Virskyy.
About the Toronto International Film Festival:
- a leading annual film festival in North America;
- in 2024, as part of the TIFF Discovery programme, the film premiered U Are the Universe by Pavlo Ostrikov;
- in 2024, the festival screened the Russian propaganda film Russians at War by Anastasia Trofimova; organisers later suspended the screenings, but said they intended to resume them when “it is safe”;
- in 2025, the film To Victory! by Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych won the top prize in the festival’s Platform competition;
- this year at TIFF there will be the world premiere of the documentary film Black Sunflowers about Ukrainian youth by American director James Marcus Haney, as well as a screening of the autobiographical film Patronymic by Ukrainian director Mariya Ponomarova in the TIFF Short Cuts short-film competition.