M.T. Soto Sanfiel directs a documentary on the last survivor of the Manhattan Project

María Teresa Soto Sanfiel, lecturer of the UAB Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, directed the documentary That's the Story. Nobel laureated Roy J. Glauber remembers the making of the atomic bomb, a meeting with the last survivor of the Manhattan Project.

 

Manhattan was the codified name of the research project conducted during the Second World War by the United States with the aim of developing the first atomic bomb. Several leading scientists of the time participated in the project, including Roy J. Glauber. The success of the project brought about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, in which over 200,000 people died before the year was over and many continued to suffer from consequences decades later.

 

Glauber, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005 (together with John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch) for his contribution to the quantum theory in optical coherence, had worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the most important research centre participating in the Manhattan Project. The documentary focuses mainly on the work carried out at the centre and the scientific team behind it. It also shows audiovisual material from the Los Alamos archives which was recently declassified.

 

Maite Soto Sanfiel's team included co-director Óscar Cusó and executive producer José Ignacio Latorre, professor in Theoretical Physics at the University of Barcelona and director of the Benasque Pedro Pascual Science Centre. The film has already been shown to UAB journalism students and at different academic and scientific centres: National University of Singapore, Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), Niels Bohr Institute of Denmark, CERN, University of Edinburgh and the IEES La Garriga school. the film is distributed by Moonrise Pictures and was exhibited at the European Film Market of the Berlin International Film Festival.