Blowing Up Paradise
Directed by
In late May 2005, 10 years after the last nuclear tests in the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls, documents surfaced proving that the French government had lied for over 50 years about the extent of radioactive fallout from atomic bomb testing in the South Pacific. The documents show that between 1966 and 1967 the populations of the surrounding islands had been exposed to radiation levels 140 times higher than that of the no access zone around the Chernobyl disaster site. The documentation was published after a medical study reported the serious consequences of radioactive exposure on the population of Polynesia. Focusing on ten French atomic bomb tests, Blowing up Paradise traces a 30- year-history of experiments and public outcry.
The BBC asked me to make a film about the Rainbow Warrior or Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear missions. I said no because I thought it was just a load of hippies. By that point I had sort of ‘stumbled across’ this story of how the French had spent 30 years testing nuclear bombs in Tahiti. The Americans and Brits both tested bombs in the South Pacific but they hadn’t spent 30 years doing it. They hadn’t turned a local population into nuclear navvies - a dependent colony providing a nuclear work force. So I went back to the BBC and said that here was a story about French nuclear testing. There had been a film about the British bombs and films about the American bombs, famously Radio Bikini, and I wanted to make the French one.
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