Chernobyl Heart
Chernobyl Heart
| 22 August 2003 (USA)
Chernobyl Heart Trailers

This Academy Award-winning documentary takes a look at children born after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster who have been born with a deteriorated heart condition.

Reviews
SunnyHello Nice effects though.
Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Chernobyl Heart" is a 39-minute documentary film from 2003. The director is Maryann DeLeo and as she won an Academy award for her work here, this is still her most known and most successful work more than a decade later. The title is the perfect summary of this film. It is about the reactor catastrophe in Chernobyl, but not really about what exactly happened back then (this has been elaborated on enough times), but about what things looked like back in 2003 and how the catastrophe still had an impact on so many people's lives. The "heart" in the title refers to heart defects that are still a huge problem for new-born babies because of what the catastrophe did to their mothers and it's the prime example how this explosion he be seen as so much opposing life that it still destroys the health and lives of people who were war from existing when it actually happened. Mostly in the first half, the film also focuses on other transformations to the human body that feel really painful to watch. It is a very sad documentary, but also one where we can learn something that we have to do all we can to avoid such an event in the future because it will have an impact for decades. But it is also somewhat uplifting to see these doctors work so hard for every life despite not having the best working conditions (especially in terms of money) themselves. The fact how relevant this topic is 30 years after it happened is shown by the fact that there are still new documentaries coming out about the Chernobyl Catastrophe these days. You can see them if you really are interested in the subject. This one here is close to a must-see though and the Oscars got it right. Do not miss out. And on a final note: If you want to see a good fictional live action film dealing with this subject, go for the Oscar-nominated short film "The Door" from 2008.
Lee Eisenberg Maryann DeLeo's Oscar-winning "Chernobyl Heart" follows Irish activist Adi Roche through Ukraine and Belarus, treating children affected by nuclear fallout from the 1986 disaster. Watching the documentary, I couldn't help but think of Fukushima. Much like how Chernobyl irradiated an entire region, Fukushima leaked mass quantities of radiation into the Pacific Ocean, and a fair amount of it has reached the west coast of North America.So, when people champion nuclear energy as the solution, remember what you saw in this documentary. The children in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus are likely to suffer severe birth defects for decades to come. Some acquaintances of mine in Germany said that they have to be careful when buying mushrooms since a number of them come from Belarus's irradiated regions (which Aleksandr Lukashenko now wants to repopulate). Solar and wind produce sufficient energy without causing the birth defects that we see in "Chernobyl Heart".
Steve West The Chernobyl reactor itself is seen briefly, and from a distance, to give you an idea of what this documentary is about. Some senior citizens living in the area are interviewed, and the rest of the time is spent in orphanages and hospitals in nearby Belarus, as radiation seems to take the greatest toll on growing or developing bodies. In line with another HBO documentary I've seen, Hacking Democracy, Chernobyl Heart does not have the production values of a HBO television series.If you are easily disturbed by seeing deformities from radiation then it might be better to give this a miss, but even so it shows the disaster that has befallen Belarus (of which Chernobyl borders), which does not have enough funding of its healthcare system to handle all the victims. "Chernobyl Heart" is the name for a hole in the heart condition and the crew visit an American surgeon who repairs this condition with a $300 heart valve patch which Belarus can only afford a limited number of.
cav427 Chernobyl was a tragic event, caused by human error, and a very poor design (The reactors had no containment buildings, just 1 major example!). Not mentioned in the movie, how much pollution is really there. There are many more pollutants than just radioactive materials, all much more mutanogenic than the radioactive ones. Moreover, the narrator just cites the nuclear disaster as the cause. This is at a time when nuclear power is necessary to our economy.The birth defects shown are horrific and tragic, and all very heart wrenching, but truly how many children are effected? There are 1,000's of birth defects in the US and other countries, all can be attributed to causes other than nuclear radiation. Ever hear of the "March of Dimes"?As for the scene when she holds up the Geiger counter, and says how scarred she is, either by a lie or incompetence, she is using it inaccurately. The selector switch is on Total Count, not on a count by minute (CPM rate), as it should be. Is the total count on over 1 minute, five minutes, several hours, several days? The "clicks" registered do not match up with the count displayed either. It appears to me that it is at maybe a couple of hundred counts per minute, not 13,000 counts every single minute (The LED would look steady at that rate!). Yes there is radiation levels higher than average world background, but there are beaches in France and India, Ramsar Iran, and other places that have very high background counts, and there are relatively few incidences of cancer and birth defects. Are children with birth defects a good charity? Of course! But one should not lie, by omission or ignorance about it to collect funds.