International Uranium Film Festival

Festival Program

4:00 pm / INTRO

4:15 PM - TRIBUTE TO KLEE BENALLY

Klee Benally was a Diné (Navajo) musician, traditional dancer, artist, filmmaker, & Indigenousanarchist. Klee Benally, advocate for Indigenous people and environmental causes. He died after a battle with cancer, Dec. 30, 2023. https://kleebenally.com

TRANSMUTATIONS: VISUALIZING MATTER

USA/Canada, 2021, Director Jesse Andrewartha, Producer: Marcos Fajardo, Documentary, 70 minutes.

Transmutations is a multi-year project that explores the history, legacy and radioactivity of uranium mining during the Cold War in Canada and the US.

Captured over the course of three years using 35mm motion picture film and digital technologies, the film reveals the mineral and the people whose lives have been impacted by uranium: exminers that toiled decades underground, Indigenous leaders and activists leading the charge to clean up the mines and the places that shifted the balance of power on a global scale. Project website: www.transmutationsproject.com

6:00 pm - HANFORD CHALLENGE - PROTECTING THE FUTURE WITH A CLEANUP THAT WORKS

Our Mission: To create a future for the Hanford Nuclear Site that secures human health and safety, advances accountability, and promotes a sustainable environmental legacy. https://www.hanfordchallenge.org

RICHLAND

USA, 2023, by Irene Lusztig, 93 minutes / https://richlandfilm.com

Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past. Moving between archival past and observational present, and across encounters with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribes, and a Japanese granddaughter of atomic bomb survivors, the film blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation on home, safety, whiteness, land, and deep time. 

IRENE LUSZTIG is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. She works in a space of delicate mediation between people, their pasts, and the present-tense spaces and landscapes where unresolved histories bloom and erupt.

Q & A