Press Release – Fifteen years ago, in May 2011, the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) was held for the first time in Rio de Janeiro and quickly gained worldwide recognition. Now, the film festival, dedicated to the atomic age, kicks off its international tour this April in Chicago. It coincides with the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. From Friday, April 24, to Sunday, April 26, the IUFF, in cooperation with the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) will screen 16 films about nuclear disasters, contamination, and nuclear weapons at Chicago’s DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus,. Admission is free!
The opening film in Chicago will be “Bombshell”, a new documentary co-produced by director/writer Ben Loeterman and Gaia De Simoni that explores how the U.S. government manipulated the narrative about the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “BOMBSHELL brilliantly lays out the media manipulation it took to create the atomic bomb `bedtime story´ told to the world after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It tells how the atomic (aka nuclear) story has been manipulated from before the test explosion at Trinity in New Mexico, and how what we accept as gospel about the bomb and its use in WWII is a carefully constructed lie”, says Libbe HaLevy, producer of Nuclear Hotseat podcast (www.nuclearhotseat.com) and a jury member of the International Uranium Film Festival.
Following Chicago, the Uranium Film Festival returns to Brazil for its 15th edition in Rio de Janeiro held at Rio’s Modern Art Museum Cinematheque from May 21 to May 30.
„As always the audience in Rio can expect a carefully curated amazing atomic film program with 31 films from 13 countries on all nuclear issues“, says Márcia Gomes de Oliveira, the festival’s executive director, who accepted together with festival’s general director, Norbert Suchanek, the Nuclear-Free Future Award in 2025. Beside of Hiroshima, Chernobyl or Fukushima the IUFF in Rio will also address another nuclear threat and source of radioactive contamination until today: the thousands of atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons tests conducted by the USA, the Soviet Union, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Márcia Gomes: “To not forget this nuclear madness we open the festival this year with a remarkable Hollywood classic that already in 1954 criticized the first atomic Bomb tests like no other movie before. The Oscar-nominated science-fiction creature-feature `Them!´”.
In October then the IUFF travels to Düsseldorf in Germany and a few weeks later in fall it returns to the United States. Screenings are planned in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in Window Rock, Arizona.
“The Uranium Film Festival achieves something indispensable in our time: it makes visible what is often repressed. It gives a voice to the survivors of nuclear violence. And it reminds us that the consequences of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima are not a thing of the past, but continue to shape human lives today”, states the Peace Bell Society Berlin.
