Half Life, Pavilion Theatre, Brighton, May 21

1:57pm Wednesday 23rd May 2007

Since the fourth reactor of the nuclear set which sustained Chernobyl exploded 21 years ago, the town has been a blockbuster filmmaker's dream.

In this beautiful and subtle project, however, Brighton producers Phil Grabsky and David Bickerstaff avoided romanticising their subject.

Thanks to Mario Petrucci's prose, it instead became more of a poetic than a cinematic effort, his words adding imagination to the refreshingly non-dramatic images.

Today, Chernobyl has a few resilient residents and forests gorgeous enough to draw plans for the Ukranian ghost town to be turned into a nature reserve - contrasted, incredibly, by genuine calls for the nuclear plants to be reinstated.

In the brief discussion which followed, Grabsky and Bickerstaff explained the problems they had faced in attempting to capture a different perspective on the area. Poetry and radioactive disasters, perhaps understandably, failed to entice many funding offers from mainstream television executives.

Petrucci made his political views clear as he eloquently described the grave risks implicit in Britain's seemingly inevitable pursuit of future nuclear power options.

The threat was one made all too tangible by the footage we had been shown.

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