Arquivo

In April, 1986, Ljudmila Ignatenko is 23 years old. She is five months pregnant and deeply in love with her husband, fireman Vasili. The place where they live can hardly be described as pleasant: Pripyat, in Ucrania, a city built in the vicinity of Chernobyl. At dawn, on the 26th of that same fateful month, Vasili is called in haste: generator number 4 of the nuclear platform is ablaze. “Go back to sleep, I‚Äôll call you when I‚Äôm back”, he says to his wife. Vasili then makes his way to center stage of the biggest nuclear accident in history, with exposure, for the population in the city, to indices of radioactivity one hundred times greater than those of the atom bomb dropped over Hiroshima. “They told me not to stay anywhere near him, for he was infected and would contaminate me”, says Ljudmila. By May 3, her husband can no longer get himself out of bed unassisted. After the death of Vasili, she gives birth to a baby named Natasha, who lives for only five days. According to the doctors, the baby saved the mother’ life, by absorbing all of the radiation. The script for The Voice of Ludmila was based on the book “The Prayer for Chernobyl”, by Svetlana Alekseivitch.