Radio Bikini

1 Review

After bombing Japan and ending World War Two, US officials began a jingoistic push to test more atom bombs near the Pacific island of Bikini Atoll. Robert Stone’s 1988 Oscar-nominee explores the devastating effect of the tests. Though it takes a different approach than THE ATOMIC CAFE, which covers some of the same material, Stone’s film builds to a stunner of a finale that’s no less scathing (or relevant) in its indictment of US political and military callousness.

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Release Date:	Jun 10, 1988
Running Time:	56 minutes
Country:	United States
Language:	English

synopsis

RADIO BIKINI is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning (and Oscar nominated) documentary film about the greatest operation to test nuclear weapons ever conducted by the United States. Staged at a remote Pacific atoll called Bikini in the summer of 1946, the tests (code-named Operation Crossroads) were also one of the first great ‘media events’ of the modern age. Using rare and mostly never-before-seen archival footage, the film unfolds through the eyes of the elderly chief of the Bikinians, Kilon Bauno, and a former American serviceman, John Smitherman, who was there. RADIO BIKINI combines ‘live’ radio broadcasts from Bikini in 1946 with footage of the entire operation, recreating a feeling of the event as it happened in a way that is both haunting and surreal.