by Theresa Alessandro
A powerful short film called On The Morning You Wake To The End Of The World is on BBC iPlayer at the moment. The film tells the story of 13 January 2018, when people in Hawaii received a text alert from their country’s emergency agency. They were told to seek shelter from an incoming ballistic missile, and that ‘this is not a drill’. The film explores, through the people’s own voices, their terrified reactions and the awful decisions they had to make regarding where to go and who to contact in what they believed were their final minutes before nuclear annihilation.
The film is well-made, enabling any of us to connect with what those people were feeling. Although it was a horrible situation, the actions described after the false alarm event are encouraging. Groups and individuals in Hawaii, and the family and friends who received their anguished phone calls elsewhere, are raising their voices against nuclear weapons. One person remarked that the event showed yet again, how easily an accident can happen and ‘we can’t always be lucky.’
I would recommend the film – and we can hope that the more people watch it on iPlayer, the more likely it is that the platform will continue to provide similar material.
