If You Love This Planet

If You Love This Planet

If You Love This Planet (1982), Terre Nash's directorial debut, became an international sensation when it was labelled propaganda by then US president Ronald Reagan's Republican administration and banned from showing in the United States. This 26-minute NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA film, produced by Kathleen Shannon at Studio D (known as the women's studio), is devastating in its simplicity. In the film, the US national president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr Helen Caldicott, delivers a powerful lecture about precisely what a nuclear war would mean in terms of human casualties if a single 20-megaton bomb exploded over a populated area. Nash cuts from shots of the eloquent Caldicott to horrifying black and white footage of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Inter-cut is wartime newsreel footage featuring then President Truman, whose decision it was to drop the bomb, along with Jap Zero, a 1943 US war department propaganda film featuring young, rising Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan.

If You Love This Planet is one of the definitive films of the peace movement. In 1982 it was awarded a special prize by the World Peace Council at the Leipziger Documentary and Short Film Festival and a Certificate of Merit at the Yorkton Short Film Festival. It won the 1983 Oscar for short documentary. In her acceptance speech, Nash thanked the Reagan administration for the publicity its attempts to ban the film had generated. In Canada, the CBC initially decided against broadcasting the film, claiming it was not balanced journalism, but once it had won the Oscar, If You Love This Planet was belatedly shown on CBC's late-night news hour program The Journal.