Some things you should know about your own government but were afraid to ask are made painfully manifest by this "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 protective trusteeship, but, according to Half Life, it is a strange foster parent who sees 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 O'Rourke's exceptional documentary, 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 assembled, subtly aligns itself with the still-disbelieving islanders and their lost paradise: the story seems to lap onto the screen in gentle waves until, quite suddenly and too late, we realize its powerful undertow. -Judy Bloch