70 years ago, July 16th 1945, exploded the first Atomic Bomb in New Mexico, at the Alamogordo Test Range, and the nuclear age had begun. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent... Now I am become death: the destroyer of worlds." Julius Robert Oppenheimer recalling that first atomic bomb test.
One year before the Fukushima reactor exploded, the International Uranium Film Festival was founded in 2010 in Santa Teresa, the famous artist quarter in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. The first Uranium Film Festival then was held in May 2011 in two cultural centres of Santa Teresa, Laurinda Santos Lobo and Parque das Ruinas. Since 2012 the main venue is the Cinemateque of Rio de Janeiro's Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio).
The festival is dedicated to all films about nuclear power and the risks of radioactivity, from uranium mining to nuclear waste. It throws light on all nuclear issues.
Documentaries, movies and animations are the best tool to transport information about nuclear energy and radioactivity, an invisible danger that has no taste, no smell, no colour. And a festival is the best way to bring these films to the people! The Uranium Film Festival is a project against forgetting and ignoring. The horror of atomic bombs and uranium weapons, and nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Goiânia or now Fukushima should never be forgotten - nor repeated.
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it", warns Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana(link is external).
The annual Uranium Film Festival was founded in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but it is a global festival. With a selection of films it travels around the world. It has been already in dozens of cities in Brazil, Germany, India, Portugal, Canada and USA. For example the festival was held in São Paulo, Salvador, Recife, Berlin, Munich, Lisbon, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Ranchi, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Window Rock, Washington DC, New York, ... It intends to establish anual Uranium Film Festivals on all continents.
The legal organizer of the Festival is the non-profit arts and cultural organization “Yellow Archives” (Arquivo Amarelo), based in Rio de Janeiro and registered as Brazilian charity. It depends on your donation.