The Visionaries travels to one of the most contaminated spots on the planet to show that, even though no bombs were dropped, victims from the cold war do exist. Due to an explosion at a nearby nuclear facility that remained a secret until the 1980s, some residents of the southern Ural region of Chelyabinsk were exposed to as much as twenty times the radiation as the victims of Chernobyl. Struggling to bring this human tragedy to light, the Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia (ISAR) in Washington, D.C., began an exchange program between Russians and Americans. Their goal was to get both sides talking about the real enemy in the cold war-the nuclear contamination resulting from the arms buildups in both Russia and America. Viewers will witness the extraordinary relationship that develops between two of these exchange participants-an activist from Los Almos, where the atomic bomb was invented, and a liquidator from Chernobyl-as they share their stories of tragedy and survival with the residents of Chelyabinsk.
