From October 15 to 18, the International Uranium Film Festival, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, will show a total of 14 feature films and documentaries from 10 countries in Berlin in the cinema in the Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg.

Due to the corona pandemic, we unfortunately had to cancel our festival in Rio de Janeiro last May. Instead of in Rio as planned, we will now be celebrating our anniversary in Berlin with international filmmakers and – we hope – a large and enthusiastic Berlin audience ”, says festival director Norbert G. Suchanek.

The Uranium Film Festival is a global project against forgetting: “Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote the philosopher George Santayana. The horror of Hiroshima or Nagasaki triggered by atomic bombs, nuclear accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima or the terrible consequences of uranium ammunition in Iraq or the Balkans must not be forgotten. The festival started a few months before the Fukushima nuclear accident in Rio de Janeiro, when the Chernobyl accident was almost forgotten.

Pressenza, the News Agency for Peace and Nonviolence and a member of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), congratulates the Uranium Film Festival on its 10th anniversary and its valuable work in raising awareness of the greatest danger facing humanity threatened by climate change – nuclear war and nuclear disasters.
As the festival team writes on its website, radioactivity is invisible, has no taste, no color, no smell. This danger, which hangs over the whole of humanity like the sword of Damocles, disappears all the easier from the public consciousness. The medium of film is the best way to make this invisible danger visible. And a film festival is the best way to get these films to a wide audience.

We are particularly pleased that Pressenza is able to make its own contribution to the festival’s diverse anniversary program with the documentary “The beginning of the end of nuclear weapons”.

This documentary takes viewers through a short story about the bomb and anti-nuclear activism that has fought for the abolition of nuclear weapons since it was invented. He reports on the humanitarian initiative that successfully challenged the dominant narrative of security and the historic steps that have been taken since 2010 to make a dream a reality – the ban on nuclear weapons, which is binding under international law. Finally, the film shows what everyone can do to support the entry into force of the treaty and stigmatize nuclear weapons until they are finally abolished. The film’s producer, ,Tony Robinson, will be available to answer questions from the interested audience after the screening.

Festival website and program: www.uraniumfilmfestival.org

The translation from German (to English) was done by Lulith V. from the voluntary Pressenza translation team. We are looking for volunteers!