If You Love This Planet is a 1982 short documentary film recording a lecture given to SUNY Plattsburgh students by physician and anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The movie was directed by Terre Nash and produced by Edward Le Lorrain for Studio D, the women's studio of the National Film Board of Canada. Studio D head Kathleen Shannon was executive producer.
Released during the term of the Reagan administration and at the height of Cold War nuclear tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, If You Love This Planet was officially designated as "foreign political propaganda" by the U.S. Department of Justice and suppressed in the United States. The subsequent uproar over that action gave the film a publicity boost; it went on to win the 1982 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. It appears that the first cinema showing of the film in Britain did not occur until April 2008, when it was screened by the London Socialist Film Co-op.
Read more about If You Love This Planet: Book and Radio Program
Famous quotes containing the words love and/or planet:
“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilize civilization and christianize Christendom?”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)