Meeting the people of the accident after the HBO series Chernobyl.

In the spring of 2019 the whole world watched the miniseries Chernobyl. We hung a big screen at Chornobyl HUB and invited the people the series is about. More than thirty people came: specialists from the National Museum "Chornobyl," journalists, students. Some wanted to share what they knew, others listened eagerly.

Among the guests were people played by actors. Oleksii Breus - senior engineer of the Unit 4 control room. Serhii Parashyn - in 1986 the party committee secretary of the plant, a participant in the meeting in the bunker after the explosion. And Oleksii Ananenko - one of the three engineers who went down the flooded corridors under the reactor to drain the water. For years he was reported to have died after that descent. And now he sat in the audience watching an actor play him. The evening was curated by Sergii Mirnyi.

After the screening they talked about what in the series was true and what was invented. The verdict was unanimous: it is a drama, not a documentary. The names are real, but people are credited with actions they never took and even with other people's characters. Yet the state of people in those days - fear, confusion, the feeling that something had to be done - is conveyed very accurately.

Ukrainska Pravda, Hromadske and the Kyiv Post wrote about the meeting. Next to the fictional version of events, the voices of the people who lived them were heard in the world press. Shortly before that, we took journalists around the series' filming locations in the Zone - together with Serhii Parashyn and Oleksii Breus.