Nuclear Savage

Adam Jonas Horowitz first set foot on the Marshall Islands in 1986 when he made his first film , (shown at IDFA in 1991). Returning to the islands in 1990, as an activist on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior. He was extremely unsettled by what he found there, in this former American colony in the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive coconuts, leaking nuclear waste repositories and densely populated slums - because many of these islands are now uninhabitable. In the 1950s, the United States government carried out a whole series of nuclear tests here, in preparation for the envisaged long nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. To this day, American authorities express their gratitude in official statements to the contribution made by the Micronesians to U.S. national security, world peace and democracy, although the reality of the situation is far more cynical. With an overwhelming commitment that betrays his activist roots Horowitz returned to the Marshall Islands 20 years after his Greenpeace days to tell the full story of nuclear destruction and human experimentation in paradise: the burns caused by the Bravo hydrogen bomb - a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima - in 1954; the children born on the most polluted island, Rongelap, with horrific birth defects, and the stubborn American denials that they deliberately returned the population to Rongelap in 1957, to see how the human body would cope with massive levels of nuclear radiation.