Greg Mitchell’s documentary Atomic Cover-Up at 50 minutes is not a huge time commitment, and occupies a niche in the film festival as a movie about the cover-up of a movie, except it’s light on details. The movie features no footage of interviews, and relies entirely on voice overs by actors from the written statements of its subjects. The most interesting premise, the government’s cover-up of the human cost of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only really comes up in the final third of the movie, which is about fifteen minutes long, so it’s short on details. The rest, ironically enough, feels like a retread of very-covered ground (the images are gruesome, stark, and very familiar), although the point of the movie is that for the first forty years none of that footage would feel like covered ground, because of the media lid.
