Snake Dance

With the invention of the atomic bomb, man has created the conditions for his own downfall. Nations have become entangled in a nuclear dance of death, driven by primal fear. traces the paths of two men: the father of the bomb Robert Oppenheimer, and German anthropologist Aby Warburg, who around 1900 studied the Native American Pueblo people from Los Alamos. These people were later hired to do manual labor on the secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. At the place where Native American traditions and knowledge were lost, a group of brilliant physicists engineered the first weapon of mass destruction - and they had the time of their lives. The visually poetic trip takes us to the deserted Los Alamos, to the uranium mines in Congo, and to Japan - itself recently struck by another nuclear disaster. One of the most fertile pieces of land around Hiroshima has been contaminated with plutonium, rendering it useless for 170,000 years. The anthropologist Warburg believed that the human tragedy lies in our inability to overcome our phobic reflex. We have allowed fear to rule our lives and our civilization. The two directors of this documentary apply this keen analysis to our post-nuclear era. Without using any archive footage, the filmmakers offer a personal interpretation of mankind’s disastrous decision to play God.