Chernobyl's babushkas – the women who refused to leave the exclusion zone

A new documentary follows the unlikely rebel grandmothers who returned to their radioactive homes after the nuclear disaster

On 26 April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant's reactor No 4 blew up after a cooling test. The resulting nuclear fire lasted 10 days, spewing 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Today Chernobyl's soil, water, and air are among the most highly contaminated on Earth. The reactor is at the centre of a 1,000-square-mile "exclusion zone", a quarantined no-man's land complete with border guards, passport control and radiation monitoring.