Blowing Up Paradise

Mar 16, 2005

1h 19m

★ 7.0

A story of liberty, equality and radioactivity.

Overview

Blowing Up Paradise uses color archival footage to chronicle France's explosion of various nuclear devices, in violation of the international test ban treaty, from the first test in 1966 to the last in 1995. Interviews with former and current French government officials, scientists, and nuclear advisors.

Genres

Documentary

Production Companies

Bergmann Pictures

Blowing Up Paradise Trailers

Cast

No Cast found.

Kua and Teriki will soon get married. They live on the distant Tureia island in the French Polynesia, Pacific Ocean and have just been told that something is wrong with their son Maokis heart. It is a consequence of living only 100 km away from the island of Moruroa, where France has tested 193 atom bombs for 30 years. Several of their family members are sick and Moruroa can soon collapse, which can lead to a tsunami likely to drown all of them. Vive La France is a personal and intimate story about harvesting the consequences of the French atomic program.

0.0

Atomic: History Of The A-Bomb

Jan 1, 2019

The smallest of sparks can lead to the largest of explosions. Such is the case of the Atomic Bomb and the minds who have conceived of the deadliest force the world has ever known. This new documentary Atomic: The History of the A-Bomb follows this weapon of mass destruction from inception to detonation.

8.6

Atomic People

Jun 13, 2024

Combining personal accounts with archive footage, this film features the voices of some of the only people left on earth to have survived a nuclear bomb.

6.2

Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare

Oct 13, 2009

The documentary presents the results of research on nuclear waste management in the U.S., Russia, Germany and France. The authors Eric Noualhat Guéret and Laure were accompanied by the independent French laboratory technicians radiation control, CRIIRAD. They have detected and measured radiation in many places like the U.S. Columbia River or the French plutonium factory called reprocessing plant at La Hague.

0.0

The First Secret City

Nov 15, 2015

Before the creation of the secret cities of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford, the Manhattan Project hired the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works of St. Louis to refine the first uranium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For the next two decades, Mallinckrodt continued its classified work for the Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War. The resulting radioactive waste contaminated numerous locations in the St. Louis area some of which have not been cleaned up 70 years after the end of World War II. Told through the eyes of an overexposed worker, the story expands through a series of interviews that careen down a toxic pathway leading to a fiery terminus at a smoldering, radioactively-contaminated landfill. The First Secret City reveals a forgotten history and its continuing impact on the community in the 21st Century, uncovering past wrongdoing and documenting the renewed struggles to confront the issue.

7.3

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes

Feb 28, 2022

Thirty-six years after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in Soviet Ukraine, newly uncovered archival footage and recorded interviews with those who were present paint an emotional and gripping portrait of the extent and gravity of the disaster and the lengths to which the Soviet government went to cover up the incident, including the soldiers sent in to “liquidate” the damage. Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes is the full, unvarnished true story of what happened in one of the least understood tragedies of the twentieth century.

7.5

NUKED

Oct 22, 2023

The US detonated 67 nuclear weapons over the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War, the consequences of which still reverberate down four generations to today. "NUKED," is a timely new feature documentary focussing on the human victims of the nuclear arms race, tracing the displaced Bikinian's ongoing struggle for justice and survival even as climate change poses a new existential threat. Using carefully restored archival footage to resurrect contemporaneous islanders’ voices and juxtaposing these with the full, awesome fury of the nuclear detonations, NUKED starkly contrasts the official record with the lived experience of the Bikinians themselves, serving as an important counterpoint to this summer’s Oppenheimer.

No Image Available

0.0

Nobody Told Us Anything

May 14, 2014

Between 1952 and 1967, in the largest Tri-Service operation since the D-Day landings, over 20,000 servicemen participated in British Nuclear Weapons Tests. The development of these superweapons bought our place at the world superpower table. The cost in human terms has never been fully calculated nor appreciated, in the blinding light of the bombs a shadow was cast across the lives of so many people. This documentary tells that story in archive footage and candid interviews with the survivors and their children. Its release is being supported with a collection of art from the ‘Shadow of the Bomb’ exhibition. Inspired by experiences and stories of veterans and their children this thought provoking art sets the scene for the open honest revelations in the film.

0.0

Mururoa 1973

Oct 8, 1973

In 1973 Alister Barry joined the crew of a protest boat (The Fri) to Mururoa Atoll, where the French Government were testing nuclear weapons. Barry records the assembly of the crew, the long journey from Northland, and their reception in the test zone; when The Fri was boarded and impounded by French military he had to hide his camera in a barrel of oranges.

7.7

To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb

Jul 9, 2023

Explore how one man's relentless drive and invention of the atomic bomb changed the nature of war forever, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and unleashed mass hysteria.

8.2

Manufacturing Death: Birth of the Atom Bomb

Jun 1, 2023

The birth of the atomic bomb changed the world forever. In the years before the Manhattan project, a weapon of such power was not even remotely imaginable to most people on earth. And yet, with war comes new inventions. New ways of destroying the enemy. New machines to wipe out human life. The advent of nuclear weapons not only brought an end to the largest conflict in history, but also ushered in an atomic age and a defining era of "big science". However, with the world now gripped by nuclear weapons, we exist constantly on the edge of mankind's total destruction.

6.5

Inside Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

Jul 15, 2023

A look behind the scenes of Christopher Nolan's film "Oppenheimer" about an American scientist and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

6.3

The Phenomenon

Oct 6, 2020

This documentary examines unidentified aerial phenomenon. With testimony from high-ranking government officials and NASA Astronauts, Senator Harry Reid says it "makes the incredible credible."

No Image Available

0.0

The Rosenbergs: Atomic Spies

Feb 8, 2025

Based on testimony by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, the Rosenbergs are arrested by the FBI. The couple is accused of passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the USSR. Though the Rosenbergs maintain their innocence from the start, the media and public opinion seem to have condemned them from day one. The trial does nothing to change this and ends in a death sentence. On Friday June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed in the electric chair. Julius first, then Ethel. 30 years later, the truth finally comes out. Declassified FBI archives reveal that Ethel was not guilty of being a spy; she was merely married to one. Julius did indeed commit espionage for the Soviet Union, though primarily as a recruiter, nothing at all like the fictional James Bond. This documentary, made entirely of archival footage and animated illustrations, offers a tale of espionage as well as a complex family tragedy.

10.0

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Jan 1, 1996

60 years ago, in the Algerian desert, an atomic bomb, equivalent to three or even four times Hiroshima, exploded. Named the “Blue Gerboise”, it was the first atomic bomb tested by France, and of hitherto unrivaled power. This 70 kiloton plutonium bomb was launched in the early morning, in the Reggane region, in southern Algeria, during the French colonial era. If this test allowed France to become the 4th nuclear power in the world, it had catastrophic repercussions. France had, at the time, certified that the radiation was well below the standard safety threshold. However, in 2013, declassified files revealed that the level of radioactivity had been much higher than announced, and had been recorded from West Africa to the south of Spain.

5.7

Dark Circle

Oct 8, 1982

Documentary about the nuclear industry.

6.2

City 40

Apr 28, 2016

Hidden in the heart of Russia, there is a Soviet-era city where thousands of people live and work behind barbed-wire fences monitored by armed guards. It is Ozyorsk (Ozersk), located in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, one of the most polluted places on the planet and home to the largest stockpiles of nuclear material. Its code name: City 40.

0.0

Windscale: Britain's Biggest Nuclear Disaster

Oct 8, 2007

Film revealing how political ambition fuelled the Windscale fire of 1957 and then dictated that the heroes of Windscale be made the scapegoats.

Blowing Up Paradise

Overview

Genres

Production Companies

Blowing Up Paradise Trailers

Cast

You may also like

Uncovering Fukushima

Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1