Some things you should know about your own government but were afraid to ask are made painfully manifest in Half Life, "a parable for the nuclear age" which is unfortunately not fiction. In 1947 the UN gave the Marshall Islands to the United States to be held in a protective trusteeship, but it is a strange kind of foster parent who uses his adoptive children as guinea pigs in nuclear experiments. When the H-bomb was tested in 1954, a white powder fell on the Rongilap and Utirik Atolls which turned the peaceful lives of the islanders--who had been neither warned nor evacuated--into an endless nightmare of radiation effects. In this exceptional documentary by Australian director Dennis O'Rourke, we see, through interviews and Atomic Energy Commission film footage, that their contamination was no accident of wind or weather, but the result of an official attitude which held the "savages" to be necessary lab animals in the cause of civilization. The film, sensitively shot and put together, subtly aligns itself with the still-disbelieving islanders and their lost paradise: the story seems to lap up onto the screen in gentle waves until, quite suddenly and too late, we realize its powerful undertow. Note: Half Life could not have been made at a more critical moment, since the contamination of the Marshall Islands is an issue slated for debate in the UN this year, and a Congressional bill may in fact serve to end the islanders' recourse against the U.S.