SEATTLE (WA)
April 12 - 14, 2024
Northwest Film Forum1

In memory of Klee Benally (RIP).
Navajo / Diné artist, activist and filmmaker,
author of the 2023 book No Spiritual Surrender:
Indigenous anarchy in defense of the sacred.
We are honored that he created the poster
and t-shirt designs of the International Uranium
Film Festival tours in USA in 2018 and 2024.
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INTERNATIONALURANIUM FILM FESTIVAL
The Atomic Age Cinema Fest in Seattle (WA)
April 12, 13 and 14
Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave
Seattle, WA 98122(206) 329-2629
https://nwfilmforum.org

Presented by

Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR)
https://www.wpsr.org

International Uranium Film Festival
www.uraniumfilmfestival.org

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FESTIVAL PROGRAM
Friday, April 12
7:00 pm / INTRODUCTION
7:30 pm
THE ATOMIC CAFE
USA, 1982 , directed by
Jayne Loader, Kevin
Rafferty and Pierce
Rafferty, 86 minutes.
A documentary about
nuclear war and thenuclear arms race,
consisting entirely ofstock film clips. The film
starts with footage of the1945 Trinity test and thebombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, intercut with an old interview with Paul
Tibbets, the pilot of the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb.
From there the film shows newsreels, commercials, public service films, andmilitary training films, dealing with the paranoia and propaganda of the earlyatomic age. Topics include the nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll, the Red Scare,the development of the hydrogen bomb, continued Army nuclear testing, andthe popularity of fallout shelters in the 1950s. The notorious short film Duckand Cover, which purported to teach schoolchildren about how to "duck andcover" to protect themselves in case of nuclear attack, is prominently featured.

5Saturday, April 13
4:00 pm / INTRO
4:15 PMTRIBUTE TO KLEE BENALLY
Klee Benally was a Diné (Navajo)
musician, traditional dancer,artist, filmmaker, & Indigenousanarchist. Klee Benally, advocate
for Indigenous people andenvironmental causes. He diedafter 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 ofuranium 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, thefilm reveals the mineral and the people whose lives have been impacted by uranium: exminers that toiled decades underground, Indigenous leaders and activists leading thecharge to clean up the mines and the places that shifted the balance of power on a global
scale. Project website: www.transmutationsproject.com

66:00 pm
HANFORD CHALLENGE - PROTECTING THE FUTURE WITH A CLEANUPTHAT WORKS
Our Mission: To create a future for the Hanford Nuclear Site that secureshuman 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 housethe 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 stakingits identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of thehabits 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 spaceof delicate mediation betweenpeople, their pasts, and thepresent-tense spaces andlandscapes where unresolved
histories bloom and erupt.
Q&A7

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Sunday, April 14
3.00 PM / INTRO
3:15 PMATOMIC BAMBOOZLE: THE
FALSE PROMISE OF A NUCLEARRENAISSANCE
USA, 2023, Director Jan Haaken,
Documentary, 47 minutes
As pressure mounts in the US tomeet net zero carbon goals, thenuclear 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 inthe early 21st century to promote small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) as a technologicalsolution.
ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE 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 (Waluulapum member of theConfederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation) points to the buried legacy of
atomic weapons production and nuclear power generation at Hanford Nuclear Reservationin Washington State and to its devastating impacts on tribal communities. University ofBritish 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 thepresent and takes up four main problems– costs, accidents, waste and proliferation–andshows how the industry continues to deny or disavow these persisting problems in themuch heralded generation of ”new nuclear.” Director Jan Haaken, a psychologist, brings
to this history of atomic bamboozling an attentiveness to the psychological ploys of theindustry. https://www.atomicbamboozle.com
Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinicalpsychologist, and documentar filmmaker. From refugee camps, war zones and abortion
clinics to drag bars, dairy farms and hip-hop clubs, her documentary films focus on people
carrying out stressful jobs on the social margins and in liminal spaces.
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HOW FAR FROM GROUND ZERO
United States, 2022, Director Brian Cowden,
Production LABRATS, Documentary, 30 min.
How Far From Ground Zero shows the Nuclear
Testing prgrams across the world and theimpact on the indigenous communities, the veterans who took part and the civillians. This
documentary is one of the most powerful ever produced to raise awareness of the testing
program. www.labrats.international

THE NUNS, THE PRIEST, AND
THE BOMBS
USA, 2018, Helen Young: Writer/Producer/ Director, Roger Schulte:
Associate Producer/Editor,
Documentary, 88 minutes.
It is considered the most serious
security breach in the history ofAmerica’s nuclear weapons infrastructure. In July 2012 three intruders broke into the Y-12
National Nuclear Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – known as America’s “FortKnox of Uranium”. Y-12 stores enough highly enriched uranium to make some 10,000
nuclear bombs. The break-in, sent shock waves throughout the U.S. Government, when law
enforcement discovered the intruders were an 82-year-old Catholic nun and two fellow
peace activists. The trio succeeded in penetrating the heart of America’s nuclear stockpile
through the sheer power of their deep conviction that nuclear weapons are immoral… anda pair of bolt cutters. Their dramatic protest, known as a Plowshares action, was designed toraise public awareness on the existential threat nuclear weapons pose to humanity.
The film follows the federal criminal trial against Sr. Megan Rice, Greg Boertje-Obed andMichael Walli, the three activists who were charged with sabotage for their protest at Y-12. It
also traces the events leading up to the Y-12 action, and profiles a community of peace
activists who, for decades, have been willing to risk long prison sentences, and even death,in an ongoing campaign to move the world away from the nuclear brink. Plowshares isderived from an injunction by the Prophet Isaiah in the Bible’s Old Testament, “They Shall
Beat Their Swords into Plowshares” -a call to transform the weapons of war into instruments
for the creation of good. https://nunspriestsbombsthefilm.com10

6:10 pm
MAKING WAVES: THE REBIRTH
OF THE GOLDEN RULE
Documentary, 25 minutes
Making Waves: The Rebirth of theGolden Rule - This 25 minutedocumentary covers the history ofthe Golden Rule historic anti-nuclearpeace boat from her first voyage in1958 through restoration from 2010
to 2015 and her current voyages. The film maker, James “Seamus” Knight of Caneyhead
Productions produced the film during the San Diego Fleet Week protest on October 14,
2017 in conjunction with Veterans For Peace, San Diego chapter.
https://vfpgoldenruleproject.org/making-waves/
Q&A

7:00 pm
BURIAL (Kapinynas)
Lithuania/Norway, 2022, Director
Emilija Škarnulytė, ProducersDagnė Vildžiūnaitė, Elisa
Fernanda Pirir, 60 minutes, In
Lithuanian and English withEnglish subtitles
A python slithers and curls over
the abandoned control room of“Chernobyl’s Big Sister” — the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania —interpreting the plant's radioactive core as an unleashed monster, one that will slither
through time for millions of years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the mostmodern of underground repositories, artist and director Emilija Škarnulytė examines
different ways in which humanity has attempted to bury the immortal. Burial is a gentle
meditation on nuclear waste that examines burial traditions, and material and ritual
heredity as it traces fresh and old scars that have been left on our geographical and culturallandscapes. https://www.justamoment.lt/burial1112ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
For 13 years, the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) has presented cutting edgefi lms on nuclear issues around the world, including Brazil, Germany, India, Canada andUnited States. Founded in 2010 by the Brazilian social scientist Márcia Gomes de Oliveira
and the German environmental journalist Norbert G. Suchanek, the International UraniumFilm Festival (IUFF) is dedicated to all nuclear topics and the entire nuclear fuel chain, fromuranium mining to nuclear waste, from nuclear war to nuclear accidents. Since 2016, whenthe International Uranium Film Festival was hosted at the famous Raleigh Studios for thefi rst time in Los Angeles it is also known as Atomic Age Cinema Fest. The next IUFF in Riode Janeiro at the Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio) Cinema is scheduled for May 25 to June
1, 2024. https://uraniumfi lmfestival.org/en
SPONSORS AND CO-ORGANIZERS
Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR)
https://www.wpsr.org
Coordinator:Jad Baaklini
jad.baaklini@gmail.com
FESTIVAL TEAMFounders & Directors
Norbert G. Suchanek
norbert.suchanek@uraniumfilmfestival.org
Márcia Gomes de Oliveira
uraniofestival@gmail.com
www.uraniumfilmfestival.org
Libbe HaLevy
Ambassador of the International
Uranium Film Festival to the USA
www.nuclearhotseat.com

The festival team kindly ask for donations and any support tomake the film screenings a big success and that theInternational Uranium Film Festival can continue. A big thankyou to all of our supporters. Donation via PayPal toinfo@uraniumfilmfestival.org

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KEEP URANIUM IN THE GROUND!
www.uraniumfilmfestival.org
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