About

The Bomb is a mind-warping audio-visual collage that brings together footage from the last 70 years to create an immersive, electrifying history of the nuclear bomb.

The three co-directors use only news footage, archival clips, and various safety and propaganda shorts to weave together a loose thematic narrative that bounces freely between decades – from modern nuclear tensions to Cold War paranoia, back to the early work on the Manhattan Project and across the devastation wrought by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The visuals are held together by a pulsating score from electronic music trio The Acid, which helps to shape and accentuate the visuals.

The film is intended as a polemic against nuclear stockpiling, although it cannot help but deal in the surreal, dissonant splendour of the recordings of bomb tests – where plumes of smoke mushroom against stark desert vistas. It is a hypnotising, occasionally breathtaking experimental montage centered on humanity's most powerful invention.

Ages 15+