This year’s International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) in Berlin honored uranium weapons expert and activist Damacio A. Lopez with the festival’s Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award. For over thirty years, the US Air Force veteran from New Mexico has campaigned for an international ban on depleted uranium munitions and weapons. Damacio Lopez received the festival trophy at the “Kino & Bar in der Königstadt” in Berlin. “The 82-year-old is probably the world-wide most experienced and most interviewed scholar and activist on uranium weapons. “His newly published booklet His recently published dossier `My Last Battle: Ban Uranium Weapons´ is after all a profound investigation of the military use of depleted uranium”, says IUFF general director Norbert Suchanek. “The serious consequences of the use of uranium ammunition on battlefields and military firing ranges should be known to everyone.” As Damacio states: “We must move quickly to stop this senseless tragedy by supporting a global call to action to ban the use of uranium munitions.“
From October 7 to 11, 2025, the Uranium Film Festival Berlin presented around 20 films about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear testing, uranium weapons, uranium mining, and nuclear power at several venues – Zeiss Großplanetarium, Lichtblick Kino, Filmkunst 66, Moviemento Kino, Kino & Bar in der Königstadt, and ACUD Kino.
In addition, French director and investigative TV journalist Cédric Picaud received the trophy of the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) in Berlin last week for his documentary “The Polygon (Le Polygone, un secret d’État).” The documentary exposes radioactive contamination during the Cold War in the Pontfaverger-Moronvilliers region of northeastern France. Scientists there tested the detonators of French atomic bombs with radioactive elements for decades. To this day, these elements contaminate the region’s subsoil and threaten Paris’s drinking water resources. Cédric Picaud, 50, is an experienced TV journalist and has worked for the broadcaster “France 3 Champagne-Ardenne”.
Founded in Rio de Janeiro in 2010, the International Uranium Film Festival was named one of the “25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World” last year by MovieMaker Magazine in Hollywood. The festival founders, Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek, also received the prestigious Nuclear-Free Future Award this year.
