The Door is a 2008 short film (16 minutes) directed by Juanita Wilson. It is based on an account by Nikolai Kalugin in the oral history Voices from Chernobyl.
Although the film was an Irish production, all the dialogue is in Russian. A man on a motorcycle enters an abandoned town, a place where he obviously is not supposed to be. Evading security guards, he enters an empty apartment, and takes a door off its hinges. He lashes the door to his motorcycle and speeds away. Then a series of flashbacks tells the man's story, which goes back to the hurried evacuation of the town of Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster
of 1986.
Tropes:
- Abandoned Area: The man sneaks into the town of Pripyat, which in Real Life has been left abandoned ever since the Chernobyl disaster.
- All There in the Manual: The credits reveal that the parents are named Nikolai and Anya.
- Baldness Means Sickness: Even little Lena knows what it means when she's being taken down a hospital ward with her parents, and she sees a group of bald children sitting on a bench.
- Based on a True Story: A highly accurate dramatization of the story of Nikolai Kalugin and his family, as recounted by Kalugin in Svetlana Alexievich's book Voices from Chernobyl.
- Death of a Child: The little daughter dies from cancer caused by exposure to radiation.
- Epic Tracking Shot: It's only about 75 seconds long, but there is a complex tracking shot as the camera snakes through all the rooms of the apartment, following the father, mother, and daughter hurriedly leaving their apartment in Pripyat.
- Face Framed in Shadow: The man, as he sits for a moment to contemplate in the abandoned apartment, before he gets to work removing the door.
- Meaningful Echo: The father in narration says "That day, we didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole world." That introduces the flashbacks starting with the evacuation of Chernobyl. At the end as Lena is being buried, the father says that line again, and the second time it's obvious that he's talking about his daughter.
- Narrator: The father narrates his story of evacuating Pripyat, and how he had to sneak back in and get the door to use for Lena's funeral.
- Title Drop: "The door" was a family heirloom that the man's father had been laid out on prior to his burial; the man's daughter is laid out as well.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Most of the film is flashbacks showing the evacuation of Pripyat and the tragic aftermath.
