Description:
The story of how the Cold War superpowers, in their race to develop more and more deadly bombs, spent forty years developing weapons capable of wiping out entire nations, while sacrificing their own vulnerable populations in the name of national security. It narrates the horrors of the Soviet and US nuclear-weapons testing and the damage it has inflicted upon the health of populations living around or downwind from the testing sites in Kazakhstan and the United States. It also tells the story of the popular anti-testing movement that brought together victims and activists from the two countries and helped achieve the closing of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. The film serves as a stark reminder of the grave humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons and implicitly underscores the importance of achieving the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).
Biography:
André went into filmmaking as an anthropologist having completed his doctorate at Oxford University. He was the editor of Granada Television’s Disappearing World series during the 1980s, and ran the BBC Documentary Department’s Independent Unit in the 1990s where he founded the award-winning documentary strand Fine Cut (now Storyville). He has been responsible for several hundred hours of factual programs for the international TV market and producer or executive producer of fifteen films with Werner Herzog since Lessons of Darkness in 1992 and including the most recent film Into the Inferno. As a director, André’s film Night Will Fall has won a number of awards including an Emmy, a Peabody Award, the Royal Television Society Award, and two Focal International Awards. His latest film, Where the Wind Blew was completed in 2016 for release in 2017. André is currently president of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California.
