White Horse

A long road crossing snowy landscapes, interrupted by army checkpoints. A young man returns to the traces of his childhood, to the block of council flats where he was living the day of the disaster, where he had never returned and will never return. In the deserted building, with crumbling walls, memories come flooding back, amplified by the beloved poster of a white horse, a cooker drawn on a window, a little ball–too intense to put into words. A landscape white, grey, green, blue, desolate, deserted, the infinitely dismal apartment blocks, and from the window, a clear view of the dark mass of Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor, the area is sinister, but for the young man, it holds the colours of a lost paradise, whose loss he cannot accept, clinging to his ball like “Citizen” Kane to his “Rosebud”. (Yann Lardeau)