Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, the Ukrainian director of the award-winning drama The Tribe, is to shoot his follow-up feature inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, around the site of the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster.
Entitled Luxembourg – a nod to the size of the territory contained in the exclusion zone – Slaboshpitsky’s film is described as a fable about “people living in a permanent nuclear winter in a primitive post-apocalyptic society”. The “ruins of the old civilisation destroyed by an atomic war” will also feature – presumably in the form of the buildings abandoned when the area was evacuated in 1986, hours after the explosion and fire at the plant.
Slaboshpitsky has made work in the exclusion zone before: his short film, Nuclear Waste, won a Silver Leopard at the Locarno film festival in 2012. His debut feature, The Tribe, set in a school for deaf adolescents, won multiple awards, including the Critics’ Week grand prize at Cannes and the Sutherland trophy for “most original and imaginative first feature” at the London film festival.
