Filmmaker James Jones had no idea when he started it two years ago that a terrible synchronicity would make his blistering documentary about the nuclear accident in northern Ukraine a must-watch

Had it been released at any point in the past few years, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes would have been an important documentary; a feature-length blend of audio interviews and largely unseen archive footage that puts the 1986 disaster into horrifying new perspective. That it comes out now – just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including an attack on the Chernobyl site itself – makes it as unmissable as it is harrowing.

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes — uncovering the real story

It was a sunny Saturday morning in the middle of spring and there was little sign that anything was wrong. Mothers pushed prams, men in short sleeves strolled through the streets, children sucked on ice lollies. Only the footage from that day gives a hint of anything amiss: every few moments the image flickers, flashes of light appearing on the screen.

This was the Ukrainian city of Pripyat on the morning of April 26, 1986. Just a few hours earlier, at 1.23am, a reactor at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant had exploded in what would prove to be the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Yet that morning, in the words of Oleksandr Sirota, a ten-year-old schoolboy: “Absolutely nothing made you think that something was wrong.”
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