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- International Uranium Film Festival
FILM PROGRAM
6.30 pm - ATOMIC COVER-UP
USA, 2021, Director: Greg Mitchell, CoProducers: Greg Mitchell and Suzanne Mitchell, Documentary, 52 min, English
The widely-acclaimed 2021 film Atomic Cover-up is the first documentary to explore the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 from the unique perspective, words and startling images of the brave cameramen and directors who risked their lives filming in the irradiated aftermath. It reveals how this historicfootage, created by a Japanese newsreel crew and then an elite U.S. Army team (who shot the only color reels), was seized, classified top secret, and then buried by American officials for decades to hide the full human costs of the bombings as a dangerous nuclear arms race raged. All the while, the producers of the footage made heroic efforts to find and expose their shocking film, to reveal truths of the atomic bombings that might halt nuclear proliferation. Atomic Cover-up represents, at least in part, the film they were not allowed to make, as well as a tribute to documentarians everywhere.
ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE: THE FALSE PROMISE OF A NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE
USA, 2023, Director Jan Haaken, Documentary, 47 min, English
As pressure mounts in the US to meet net zero carbon goals, the nuclear power industry makes its case for a nuclear “ renaissance” to solve the climate crisis. In place of the highly costly reactors that have been shut down across many regions of the country, investors began in the early 21st century to promote small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) as a technological solution. The film follows anti-nuclear activist Lloyd Marbet and attorneys Greg Kafoury and Lauren Goldberg as they draw lessons from the decades-long fight to shut down the Trojan Nuclear Power plant in Oregon and expose current campaigns to revive the industry.
Climate activist Cathy Sampson-Kruse (Wallulapum member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation) points to the buried legacy of atomic weapons production and nuclear power generation at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State and to itsdevastating impacts on tribal communities. University of British Columbia professor M. V. Ramana, a physicist and internationally recognized scholar on nuclear power, traces the history of nuclear power generation from the 1950s to the present and takes up four main problems– costs, accidents, waste and proliferation–and shows how the industry continues to deny or disavow these persisting problems in the much heralded generation of ”new nuclear.”