The Believers tells the strange story of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, chronologically documenting the summer of 1989 as well as new developments today. The tale includes mystery, scandal, personal tragedy, and scientific wonder. As in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, understanding of events shifts depending on who is telling the story. A mixture of interviews, footage, archival media, scientific animation, and reenactments will compliment interviews with scientists, journalists, politicians, and officials. Woven together, they paint a vivid, often contradicting account of what happened.Martin Fleischmann is at the core of the story, both as a fiery intellect in 1989 who achieved near rock-star status and a musing, evasive recluse who today suffers from Parkinson's disease and has become the figurehead of the small band of aging scientists who still pursue cold fusion experiments. The film explores basement laboratories in New Mexico, Illinois, and California where these believers continue to work, desperate to prove their detractors wrong while wondering if the field will survive when they retire.Cold fusion scientists and their detractors - the physicists - each claim the other side is blinded by desire. These physicists claim the cold fusionists so desperately want to be right that they overlook fundamental truths about the nature of the atom; cold fusionists claim the physicists are so sure of their facts that they have lost the ability to question them. No definitive answer is presented, so the viewer must determine what --- and whom --- to believe.
