Nuclear Now (2023)
Director: Oliver Stone Run Time: 105 min. Release Year: 2023
Country: United States
Language: English, French, Russian
About the film:
World Premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.
With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, Nuclear Now (2023) explores the possibility for the global community to overcome the challenges of climate change and energy poverty to reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy.
“an intensely compelling, must-see documentary”
—Owen Gleiberman, Variety
Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy. Science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th century, first for bombs and then to power submarines. The United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid-20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests. This campaign would sow fear about harmless low-level radiation and create confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
Looking squarely at the problem, Oliver Stone shows us that knowledge is the antidote to fear, and our human ingenuity will allow us to solve the climate change crisis if we use it.
The film features features one of the final orchestral film scores of Vangelis, known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire (1981) and many other projects, including Blade Runner (1982) and Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
About the filmmaker:
Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter known for stories focusing on controversial American political issues of the late 20th century. Stone served as an infantry soldier in the Vietnam War, which informed his critically acclaimed war dramas that include the Academy Award winners Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), followed by Heaven & Earth (1993). His other features include financial drama Wall Street (1987), the action comedy Natural Born Killers (1994), biopics The Doors (1991) and Snowden (2016), and a trilogy of films based on American presidents: JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), and W. (2008). Stone also won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as writer of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978).
Increasingly concerned about the lack of progress in addressing climate change and reducing CO2 emissions, he contributed his skill as a filmmaker and storyteller to the pronuclear effort. Co-written with Joshua S. Goldstein based on Goldstein’s 2019 book “A Bright Future”, Stone’s documentary Nuclear Now (2023) premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, where it won the CICT-UNESCO Enrico Fulchignoni Award.
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