One of the most strategically significant aspects of the race between Nazi Germany and the Allied Powers to develop an atomic bomb during World War II was the acquisition of heavy water, a necessary ingredient in nuclear fission reactors. The major source in Europe was the Vemork power plant in the Telemark region of Norway, which came under German occupation in 1940. In an effort to prevent the transport of the heavy water produced there to the German bomb program, commandos attacked the facility in February 1943. That mission was dramatized in Hollywood style in Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark (1965), and a half-century later in a Norwegian mini-series called The Heavy Water War [see VL Online 5/17/16]. Nicolas Jallot’s documentary shares its title with the mini-series, but the approach is different. It employs archival footage, along with interviews with scholars as well as relatives and friends of participants, to celebrate the mission, but also includes extensive clips from the 1948 film Kampen om tungtvannet, co-directed by Jean Dréville and Titus Vibe-Müller, which represented a factual reconstruction of both the commando raid and the 1944 bombing of a ferry carrying heavy water to Germany. One of the stars of the film, here shown in the subtitled version La Bataille de l’eau lourde, is the eminent French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who was instrumental in researching nuclear chain reactions in the late 1930s and secured a shipment of heavy water from Vemork to France before the German occupation. Jallot complements the film’s treatment of the sabotage missions with what is effectively a biography of Joliot-Curie, from his childhood and marriage to Irène Curie, daughter of Marie Curie, the Nobel-prize winning scientist who pioneered research on radioactivity, through his work in the French resistance during the war and his post-war direction of the French National Center for Scientific Research; as High Commissioner for Atomic Energy, he oversaw the construction of the nation’s first nuclear reactor. Nor does Jallot ignore the socialist political views that made Joliot-Curie suspect to American administrators after the war and led to his becoming one of the signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, which warned of the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for the peaceful resolution of international conflicts. The Franco-centric nature of Heavy Water War points to its Gallic origin, but the narration has been replaced with an English version, though subtitles are used in interview segments in French and Norwegian, as well as the clips from La Bataille de l’eau lourde. Recommended. Aud: P, H, C. (F. Swietek)