Updated 4:28 p.m. Moscow Time
MOSCOW, October 14 (RIA Novosti) – A new Russian teen drama retelling the story of Chernobyl is airing today on Russian television, AFP informs.
The movie has eight, hour-long episodes and is aired on TNT, a youth-oriented channel, AFP said.
The show starts today and will follow a group of teenagers in Pripyat, the Ukrainian town evacuated after the disaster. Five teenagers decide to go on a roadtrip, but after following a thief the group is lost and ends up in Chernobyl, according to a Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
"In the movie, it is absolutely impossible to predict the plot", said Aleksandr Dulerain, general producer of TNT, as quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda.
"I wanted to tell the story of this to an audience ... that doesn't have such a personal sense of empathy," said co-writer and producer Yevgeny Nikishov, as quoted by AFP.
The TV show has footage filmed in Pripyat, where radiation levels are still highly dangerous and Ukrainian authorities control the access to the streets of the ghost town.
Yandex, the largest and most popular search engine in Russia, has released the street view option for Pripyat. Now everyone can take a virtual tour along the streets of Pripyat.
More than 25,000 cleanup workers are believed to have died since the disaster, according to official Ukrainian figures, AFP reports.
On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant, affecting the lives of millions of people. A vast area estimated at 50,000 square kilometers was contaminated by the fallout from the critical nuclear meltdown. Some 200,000 people were relocated following the accident.
