Yet again I am reminded of the power of cinema to entertain, educate and inform. Yes I know it's all manipulation and the real meaning is constructed in the edit room, but last night I saw a Danish film 'The Idealist' (2015) which was an expose of the conspiracies surrounding a nuclear disaster at the Thule airbase in Greenland during the Cold War, Greenland then being a colony of Denmark which the Americans wanted to buy. In 1968 a there was an American bomber plane crash carrying four nuclear war heads on the base, and during the clean up both Americans and Danes were infected by radioactivity. Throughout the film we followed the efforts of a whistle blower journalist Poul Brink in the 1980s to expose the accident, get survivors recognised for compensation and the then Prime Minister uncovered for the deal he'd secretly done with the Americans to allow nuclear weapons on the base at all. Original archive footage was seamlessly woven together with fictional dramatic performances. I was ashamed that yet again, this event had happened during my lifetime but I had been ignorantly unaware. in fact, I haven't felt so ashamed since watching 'Hotel Rwanda.' I was gripped by the performances and the unfolding of events. I came away better informed and impressed again by the intelligent medium of cinema to move and engage me.
Review of The Idealist
