1984 / UK / 110 mins / Dir: Mick Jackson
Cast: Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, Anne Sellors

Mick Jackson’s critically acclaimed documentary style account of a nuclear holocaust and its effect on the working class city of Sheffield received 4 BAFTA nominations when it premiered in 1984.

Young Ruth Beckett and her fiancé, Jimmy, are setting up home together in Sheffield while expecting their first child. Meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East are increasing and when America intervenes in Iran the British authorities issue futile pleas for calm around the country. The trouble escalates into nuclear war and the world is devastated, transmuted into a broken, barren, nightmarish landscape where everything humanity relies upon, from sunlight to food supplies, can no longer be taken for granted. This becomes Ruth’s story, but also a broader, fly-on-the-wall glimpse into a post-nuclear war future.

Director Mick Jackson shoots the piece as if filming an actual disaster, using a documentary-maker’s dispassion that renders the grey, gruesome scenes unbearably compelling. The blend of personal tragedy and global catastrophe is deftly handled but it’s the attention to detail and stunning breadth of the work which most impresses.

  ‘Horrifying, moving and powerful. Watch it by yourself, late at night and never sleep again.’ Empire Magazine