The International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) welcomes two new members: Libbe HaLevy from California and Damacio A. Lopez from New Mexico.

Libbe is producer of the weekly radio show Nuclear Hotseat. As Ambassador of the Uranium Film Festival to the USA, Libbe will help to promote the festival throughout North America and to establish it in California, particularly in Los Angeles.  And the depleted uranium weapons expert Damacio is the new International Uranium Film Festival director of the American Southwest. 

More about Libbe HaLevy 

Libbe HaLevy  is Producer and Host of Nuclear Hotseat, a weekly podcast/radio show on all things nuclear. It's a real powerhouse program of news, high profile interviews, and even some humor.  In production since three months after Fukushima began IN 2011, the show has been downloaded in 124 countries and has more than 600 episodes archived at: www.NuclearHotseat.com

 Libbe was one mile from the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Her work on Nuclear Hotseat led to Libbe being awarded the 2022 Nuclear Free Future Award in Education. She writes movingly about the experience in her Amazon #1 Bestselling book, YES, I GLOW IN THE DARK: One Mile from Three Mile Island to Fukushima and Nuclear Hotseat.  In it, she draws parallels between nuclear industry officials and perpetrators of sexual abuse, and explains how the people at nuclear sites have been HARMED BY THE IMPACT OF RADIATION. Libbe also co-created Radiation Awareness Protection Talk, or RAPT, a 6-audio series on how to best protect your health from the negative impact of radioactivity. www.RadiationProtectionAwareness.com

During an extensive career in broadcasting, Libbe worked for Chicago’s WGN, Boston’s WGBH, and 20th Century Fox. An award- winning playwright, her plays and musicals have been produced internationally. Her current project, ATOMIC BILL AND THE PAYMENT DUE, deals with media manipulation at the dawn of the atomic age. Libbe’s involvement with the IUFF is extensive. She covers it on Nuclear Hotseat, was a judge in 2021, and attended in Quebec City in 2015.  In 2016 she was part of the Nuclear Power Panel at the IUFF in Hollywood, together with stars Esai Morales, Kat Kramer, Lou Gossett, Jr., Mimi Kennedy, and Harvey Wasserman. Sign up for a weekly email link to the show at: www.NuclearHotseat.com

More about Damacio A. Lopez

 Damacio A. Lopez was born in Socorro, New Mexico in 1943. He is a United States Air Force veteran who served his country during the Cuba crisis (1962). Since 1985 Damacio has been seeking a global ban on depleted uranium when he first learned that depleted uranium (DU) weapons were being tested less than two miles from his family home. He founded IDUST (International Depleted Uranium Study Team) in collaboration with Maria Santalli in 2000 and is co-founder of the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW). Currently, IDUST is preparing a global call to action campaign to ban these weapons at the United Nations. 

During his career as DU-activist and scholar he authored and co-authored several scientific papers on Depleted Uranium Munitions and has traveled to over 30 countries (including Iraq, the Balkans and Japan) giving presentations on the hazards and effects of depleted uranium on troops and people who live near testing sites, such as the people in his hometown of Socorro. In addition Damacio assisted and starred in several documentary films like “Invisible War: The Politics of Radiation” by Canal Plus, directed by Martin Meissonniers and “Uranium 238: The Pentagons Dirty Pool” by Dr. Pablo Ortega. The film won the best short film category in the first International Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. Two years later, in 2013, he accepted the challenge of co-organizing the International Uranium Film Festival in Arizona and New Mexico including the capital of the Navajo Nation Window Rock as well as Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

About the Festival

Founded in 2010 by the Brazilian social scientist Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and the German environmental journalist Norbert Suchanek, the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) is dedicated to all nuclear topics and the entire nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining to nuclear waste, from nuclear war to nuclear accidents. In the last 13 years, Uranium Film Festivals have been held not only in Rio de Janeiro annually but also in several other countries and cities such as Berlin, Lisbon, New Delhi, Montreal, New York and Washington DC.  It has been twice, 2013 and 2018, in Window Rock, ABQ and Santa Fe. Since 2016, when the International Uranium Film Festival was hosted in partnership with Hollywood star Kat Kramer at the famous Raleigh Studios for the first time in Los Angeles it is also known as Atomic Age Cinema Fest. Top photo shows the International Uranium Film Festival 2024 in Window Rock - Photo by Norbert Suchanek)

Contact the festival for any question!