Countdown to Zero

From Participant Media and producer Lawrence Bender, who last teamed for the Academy Award® winning An Inconvenient Truth, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO is a stunning documentary about the escalating global nuclear arms crisis. Written and directed by Lucy Walker (Waste Land, Blindsight), the film is a fascinating and frightening exploration of the dangers of nuclear weapons, exposing a variety of present day threats and featuring insights from a host of international statesmen and experts. Among the voices are President Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf, Tony Blair, former CIA Operations Officer Valerie Plame Wilson, the Ploughshares Fund’s Joe Cirincione and Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan. COUNTDOWN TO ZERO traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs: nine nations possessing nuclear weapons capabilities and others racing to join them, with the world held in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy, or a simple accident. It makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, an issue more topical than ever with President Obama and other world leaders working to revive this goal today. Following its world premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO was screened for attendees of this year’s Global Zero International Conference in Paris and the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. Magnolia Pictures will release the film in theaters in North America this July.