Césio 137 - O Pesadelo de Goiânia

The closest our cinema will ever get to the powerful "The China Syndrome" and deal with the dangers of nuclear energy and radioactivity. Both films are quite haunting and know how to impress its viewers. But "Césio 137 - O Pesadelo de Goiânia" ("Goiânia's Nightmare") has a more devastating effect afterwards because it's about a real tragedy that took place in Goiânia, in 1987 and it's considered the biggest radiological incident ever registered.

It all started when two scavengers (played by Paulo Gorgulho and Paulo Betti) took a heavy metal object from an abandoned hospital to sell the material thinking it would have some scrap value. Sold the material to scrapyard owner Devair (Nelson Xavier), the problems began right away when the men started to feel sick, and everyone around them blamed about the food they ingested. When Devair discovers a blue light coming out of the object, he begin to find the object valuable and beautiful, extracting the source of such light to everyone he knows simply because it glows in the dark. Adults like it, kids like it. And the rest you can already predict. Tragedy takes place with more and more people getting sick believeing they're getting all those problems due to bad food. What they would find out days later is that they were contaminated with a radioactive agent from that stolen piece, a composition from a X-Ray device.

Although constructed with factual testimonies from the real people, survivors of the event (that killed 4 people in 1987 and 80 more in the years to come) this doesn't get near the real life tragedy, it just gives you a good and hard perspective of how the story broke out to the world. The brief presentation I made about the film is the whole movie. Most of it is quite repetitive, circling time and time again on the object's fate and contamination. But not much time were given to the aftermath of the case, rushing things in the nick of time. A better script and a better editing would help an already good film.

It's a powerful film and we can all agree on that. It's a story about a tragic ignorance from all sides - the population, the medical doctors, the authorities who managed the isolation afterwards and little did they know about it - but the radiation isn't the sole invisible villain from it. We need to talk about the "educated" people who closed down a whole facility and left those equipments there. Their stupidity is enormous, the other invisible villain from the movie. In the real case, they were fined in court but no one was held responsible, no one went to jail for their shameful mistake.

As said before, this doesn't get near the frightening scenario. In 2003 was released the informative short documentary "Césio 137, O Brilho da Morte" which tells not only about the tragedy but also the fate of the population who lived through it. One of my greatest joys was to see that the only concerned character of the movie, a nurse who alarmed people about the dangers of dealing with unknown materials taken from a hospital, is still living. But the shock came when it was revealed that Roberto Pires, the director of this film, was one of the Césio victims, dying a few years later.

Credible performances makes of this a very reliable project, specially the good acting from Xavier who commonly plays wise characters in movies and TV series but here gets an 180 degree turn, a scary transformation; the great Joana Fomm who plays his wife and the excellent Denise Milfont, who plays the courageous nurse. Overall, depressive but something to be seen. 8/10.

On 13 September 1987, two paper collectors find a heavy piece of machine made of lead and weighting about 100 kg in a abandoned field in Goiania. This area was used by a clinic. They sell this scrap to a junk shop. The blue light emanated from the Cesium stones fascinates the junkman, and he shows and gives some of them as a gift to many locals, humble and ignorant Brazilian persons living in a poor area of Goiás. We Brazilian lived and became aware of this terrible fact in 1987. A population of humble people were contaminated by Cesium 137 as showed in a dramatic way in this movie. I regret this movie be limited to the drama of some locals only. It should have gone further, showing the irresponsibility of the government and the Owners of the clinic who left this Cesium 137 without any care in a field without any protection. The lack of punishment of these responsible and their names should also be shown in this film. The screenwriter and director Roberto Pires lost the opportunity to make a masterpiece like, for example, Costa-Gravas usually presents in his movies. This fact remains as a shame in the recent Brazilian history. A shallow movie of a great and deep wound in Brazilian history. My vote is seven.