The Beginning or the End

The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.

Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai, Mark Cousins presents an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times – protest marches, Cold War sabre-rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima – but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how x-rays and MRI scans have improved human lives. The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too.

Radio Love

A president and his government are meeting in emergency after an enemy country launches a nuclear missile.

Based on a play by Hisashi Inoue, it focuses on the sufferings of the survivors of Hiroshima. The film takes place during 4 days in the summer of 1948, as the ghost of her father visits Mitsué (Rié Miyama). He had somehow learned that she has fallen in love, and tries to convince her to start her new life. But Mitsué obstinately refuses his warm and humorous encouragements : « People were killed in my place. I do not have the right to find happiness », she says.

In a post-apocalyptic world divided between two groups called the Flockers and the Ravagers, an adventurer and his "pleasure girl" try to find their way to a rumored safe haven called the Land of Genesis.

At a church in the country, eternally optimistic John marries Maria, his Atomic War Bride, as a war starts, planes buzz overhead and bombs start dropping. Though John is "mobilized" by the military seconds after the ceremony, he and Maria seek to be reunited.

Stories of the people who built the first atomic weapons are well known. But what about those who provided the uranium? We look at a mysterious man who derived huge profits from the business of war.

An ageing fishing boat, Dai-go Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") sets out from the port of Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It travels around the Pacific line fishing. While the ship is near Bikini Atoll, the ship's navigator sees a flash. All the crew come up to watch. They realize it is an atomic explosion, but take time to clear their fishing gear. A short time later, grey ash starts to fall on the ship. When the ship returns to port the sailors have been burned brown. They unload the fish, which are then transported away. They visit the local doctor and then go to Tokyo for an examination. It turns out they are all highly radioactive. Their symptoms become worse, and the contaminated fish causes a panic.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is a hibakusha. A survivor of both atomic bomb blasts in 1945. First at Hiroshima, then again at Nagasaki. Now nearing 90, Yamaguchi finally speaks out. Breaking taboos of shame and sorrow, he responds to a call to fight for a world without nuclear weapons by telling his story, so that no one else will ever have to tell one like it again. Twice reconstructs Yamaguchi’s experiences in 1945 Japan, interviews him on the after-effects of exposure and documents the last five years of the late-blooming activist’s life.

London, England, May 2000. The peaceful life of elderly Joan Stanley is suddenly disrupted when she is arrested by the British Intelligence Service and accused of providing information to communist Russia during the forties.

The story of Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Although unaware of the full potential of this new weapon, he knows that it can do tremendously more damage than any other weapon used before, and that the death toll resulting from it will be huge. He is reluctant to be the person who will end so many lives, but as time goes on, the pressure upon him only increase.

As the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Gen. Fellers is tasked with deciding if Emperor Hirohito will be hanged as a war criminal. Influencing his ruling is his quest to find Aya, an exchange student he met years earlier in the U.S.

NUMEC: How Israel Stole the Atomic Bomb and Killed JFK. Terrorists took advantage of the massive weapons surplus following the end of WWII and created lucrative black-markets for illegal arms trafficking many of which went to ethno-fascist fanatics who created the state of Israel. The weapons theft would escalate to Highly Enriched Uranium for nuclear bombs and the assassination of a US president.

"You have to think about whether they're really your friends," Johnny's dad says when Johnny talks to him about the grief his pals have been giving him lately. The other boys haven't exactly tried to understand why Dad opened up his family's home to Miyeko, a survivor of the Hiroshima Atomic bomb. Although she is only in America a short time to have surgery on her badly scarred face and arm, her visit reveals just how many ignorant and intolerant attitudes still exist 10 years after the war's end. But Johnny, who also resents Miyeko at first, becomes one of her fiercest defenders after he makes the effort to look past her outward appearance. Only then can the scars begin to heal.

In 1945, the second- and third-year students of a Hiroshima girls' school are taken away to work in war factories. The remaining 220 girls of the first year try to make the best of their new-found status as the only teenagers in an almost deserted town, even amid the deprivations of wartime. On the seventh of August, an American bomber changes their lives forever. Broadcast on the 43rd anniversary of Hiroshima in memory of "the girls who lost their lives to the atom bomb." (Source: Anime Encyclopedia)

The lives of several Japanese families are shattered as the USA and the USSR move toward war, Japan finds itself caught in the middle, and Tokyo is ultimately evacuated as the two superpowers invoke the 'nuclear option'.

Chronicling the lives and covert activities of the so-called "atom spies" in the 1940s, including the big one that got away, Theodore Alvin Hall.

Direct to DVD movie: The German U-Boat, U-234, from the Port of Kiel is trading cargo with the Japanese. USS Seaviper must locate and stop this dangerous exchange. The Captain of USS Seaviper must go ashore to conduct reconnaissance on an island near Sumatra, but the ship is left in the hands of Mister Cutter, after the Executive Officer is injured in battle. A conflict between Cutter and the Chief of the Boat puts the submarine in jeopardy. Seaviper is trapped below the surface, with decreasing oxygen, and a Japanese destroyer hunting them from above. Damage to the boat also leave her survival in question. They must fight the Japanese destroyer and get the information about U-235 back to Pearl Harbor.

Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.