
The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children
Depleted uranium munitions, fired by the ton during the Gulf War and the Iraq War that followed, leave behind a radioactive dust that does not go away, and this German television film follows the people trying to measure what it has done to bodies on both sides of the fighting. British veterans Kenny Duncan and Jenny Moore describe their own exposure and the congenital abnormalities in their children, on camera, without narration standing between them and the viewer. Dr. Siegwart-Horst Gunther, once a colleague of Albert Schweitzer, travels from Germany to Iraq to test contamination levels himself, and Tedd Weyman of the Uranium Medical Research Center arrives from Canada with the same goal, both men working outside official channels because no government body was doing the testing for them. The film moves between hospital wards, interviews, and readings taken in the field, building its case less through argument than through the accumulation of sick children and worried scientists across two continents.