Some have earned degrees. Some dream of opening a bakery, keeping alive the secrets of tradition. Some want to help the vulnerable and listen to others. The children of Chernobyl are children no longer. They are women and men who have endured and overcome the trauma of displacement, reclaiming their lives. None of this would have been possible without the outstretched hand of solidarity—without those who welcomed them with open arms.
This is what The Storks of Chernobyl tells us. Director Karim Galici's feature premiered in Italy on Friday, March 15, at Rome's Casa del Cinema. It is a story of rebirth and solidarity. The film begins with the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Ukrainian power plant—where 31 people officially died, followed by contamination and hundreds more deaths in the years to come—and moves into the personal journeys of its subjects.
Those children of the 1980s found themselves suddenly in Italy. In Sardinia, particularly, which became their home. "It was an incredible experience," Galici said. "An experience where we breathed air that, nearly forty years later, is still heavy. We were able to interview survivors of the disaster and enter the evacuated zones with people who are fortunate enough now to recount those moments—but who paid," Galici continued, "an enormous price: losing their homes, their towns, and in some cases their families. Stories of destruction that became beautiful to tell from the perspective of reconstruction. From individual lives to entire peoples and their lands."
So frame by frame, the film reveals extraordinary stories: three siblings, raised separately in different orphanages, then reunited in one big family; a young woman who decides to return home for love; girls who became best friends after being taken in by a grandmother in a small Sardinian village. True bridges that unite and never divide. Extraordinary bonds born from catastrophe, forcing these people to leave everything behind and flee to safety.
Produced by Cittadini del Mondo-Cinema per il sociale with support from the Fondazione di Sardegna as part of the "Networks: Social, Cultural, and Solidarity Paths" initiative, the film blends the rigor of journalism with the poetry of cinema. It teaches us that when everything seems lost, there is always a second chance. Someone near the film's end says that the storks—driven away by the 1986 nuclear disaster—are no longer in Belarus. But they made it to Italy and elsewhere in time, where they left behind children capable of taking their futures, their lives, back into their own hands.
From the early 1990s through the early 2020s, Italy welcomed roughly 600,000 Belarusian children and 100,000 Ukrainian children. Hundreds of organizations across the country organized their reception; in many cases these became adoptions, with proper legal authorization.
In this critical moment of war, such a film can only restore hope. It makes us reflect on the fact that, despite everything, much has not been lost. Essential viewing for understanding a chapter of our own history—a chapter we should be proud of.