There is a small, shrinking community of stubborn, independently minded women who returned to their ancestral homes inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They have been there for more than 25 years, but though their numbers are naturally shrinking due to old age, most researchers agree that they are outliving their counterparts of who accepted the Soviet Union’s relocation orders.

Holly Morris, a writer, director and world traveler, documents her surprise and confusion as she learned more about the independent people that decided radiation was easier to accept than relocation or starvation. However, these discoveries have not yet convinced Ms. Morris that perhaps the word “toxic” is not the best description of the contamination that has been spread so thinly over the evacuated region that people and wildlife are able to thrive without any apparent ill effects.