David Bradbury on the power of film to reveal the truth about nuclear weapons, uranium mining and other unpleasant realities
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David Bradbury
This week, Dr. Caldicott talks about the power of film with David Bradbury, described as “one of Australia’s best known and most successful documentary filmmakers” on his website. Bradbury’s 2007 film Hard Rain addresses the horrifying realities of nuclear power, and gets beneath the hype propounded by the nuclear industry. Watch a 25-minute clip here. Bradbury’s films have been shown widely in Australia and overseas, and he has won numerous prizes including five AFI awards and two Academy Award nominations (for Frontline, which profiled war cameraman Neil Davis, and for Chile: Hasta Cuando?, on the brutal military dictatorship of General Pinochet). Among other topics, Dr. Caldicott and Bradbury pay tribute to Wilfred Burchett, an iconic Australian journalist who reported from Hiroshima in the weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped. Burchett is the subject of Bradbury’s film Public Enemy Number One. Read Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer. For more on the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, be sure to watch the Emmy Award-winning film White Light, Black Rain. Later in the program, Dr. Caldicott and Bradbury look at the health and environmental ramifications of depleted uranium weapons and uranium mining in Australia, both of which have been the subject of his films. When the Dust Settles is Bradbury’s film on the latter topic, and can be watched on YouTube. To read more about Bradbury’s films (several of which can be ordered from his company’s website), click here.