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RADIOACTIVE

By Marjane SATRAPI

NK CONTENTS - as DISTR Theatrical, TV, DVD-video, VOD / BUYER REP

Romance - Completed 2019

The incredible true story of Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her Nobel Prize-winning work that changed the world.

- Year of production
- 2019
- Genres
- Romance, Biography, Drama
- Countries
- UNITED KINGDOM
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Duration
- 109 mn
- Director(s)
- Marjane SATRAPI
- Writer(s)
- Jack THORNE, Lauren REDNISS
- Cast
- Rosamund PIKE, Sam RILEY, Anya TAYLOR-JOY, Aneurin BARNARD, Jonathan ARIS
- Producer(s)
- Tim BEVAN, Eric FELLNER
- Synopsis
- In 1934, Marie Curie collapses in her laboratory in Paris. As she is rushed to the hospital, she remembers her life. In 1893 she was frequently rejected for funding due to her gender but entered a partnership with Pierre Curie. After Marie discovered polonium and radium, the two fell in love and got married, having two children. Soon, Marie announces the discovery of radioactivity, revolutionizing physics and chemistry. Radium is soon used in a series of commercial products. Pierre takes Marie to a seance where radium is used to attempt to contact the dead, but Marie disapproves of spiritualism and the idea of an afterlife after the death of her mother in Poland.
  
  Although Pierre rejects the Légion d'honneur for not nominating Marie and insists that the two jointly share their Nobel Prize in Physics, Marie becomes agitated that he accepted the Prize in Stockholm without her. Soon afterwards Pierre becomes increasingly sick with anemia as a result of his research and is trampled to death by a horse. Although she initially dismisses concerns that her elements are toxic, increasing numbers of people die from serious health conditions after exposure to radium. Depressed, she begins an affair with her colleague Paul Langevin. Although she receives Pierre's professorship at the Sorbonne, the French nationalist press reports the details of her affair with Langevin and she is harassed by xenophobic mobs due to her Polish origins. She returns to the house where she attended the seance and tearfully begs a woman who was there to try to use radium to contact Pierre. When she receives a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, she defies the committee's instructions not to travel to Stockholm and is greeted enthusiastically.
  
  In 1914, when World War I starts, her daughter Irene convinces her to run an X-ray unit on the Western Front in order to determine whether or not amputation is needed for wounded soldiers; they fund the X-ray diagnostic units by selling her Nobel Prizes to the government. Irene begins dating Frederic Joliot, but Marie disapproves of their relationship because they have been researching artificial radioactivity and warns Irene not to see him or research radioactivity anymore. Although she refuses to obey her, they go to the Western Front together to run the X-ray machine.
  
  Scenes of her life are interwoven with scenes depicting the future impact of her discoveries, including external beam radiotherapy at a hospital in Cleveland in 1956, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a nuclear bomb test in Nevada in 1961, and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. As she dies in 1934, she sees visions of these events before awakening in a hospital room. Pierre arrives and they leave the hospital together. The film concludes by stating that the Curies' X-ray unit saved millions of lives during the war, that their research would be used to create radiotherapy, and that the Joliot-Curies would discover artificial radioactivity in 1935.