RICHLAND
by Karen Pecota

Irene Lusztig, USA 2023

What happens when a country is bound and determined to be ahead of the game in nuclear warfare? The answer to this question alone continues to unfold the more the US government and its citizens are forced to confront and respond to such activity that happened over decades. Who gains, or suffers the consequences?

The city of Richland, Washington, was originally built 1940s by the US government in secret. The town, at the time, was the closest community to the Hanford nuclear site. The remote location was chosen to house the plant workers and their families. The plant manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project. The people proudly acknowledge their heritage as a nuclear company town, and their efforts to create an atomic bomb that saved lives and ended a war. But, at what cost?

Hanford plutonium was used in the Fat Man atomic bomb, detonated over Nagaski on August 9, 1945, and later supplied tens of thousands of weapons in the US Cold War nuclear arsenal. Hanford's nine reactors were actively in production for over four decades.

Documentary filmmaker Irene Lusztig offers a fascinating perspective regarding these profound facts in her documentary RICHLAND. Lusztig's filmmaking exposé explores the process a community takes to defend a controversial past history. Lusztig uses archival footage, interviews, and present-day conversations with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribe members, and a Japanese granddaughter of the atomic bomb survivors, in order to dissect the complicated narrative surrounding the largest nuclear clean-up site in the world.

Lusztig creates a unique space for all sides to share their opinions, experiences and concerns in RICHLAND. It's clear that the controversy is not easy to address globally; but she provides an avenue where every position can co-exist in the conversation. This is not a film about an environmental catastrophe past and present. It is about real people sharing their experiences that define their existence and identity.

Lusztig says, "I'm often drawn to thinking about places and communities where there's something that's being actively worked through about its own history." The city of Richland, Washington is a prime example.

Lusztig creatively uses narration of poetic expression from award-winning Kathleen Flenniken in RICHLAND to gently give thought to a lifestyle some would think unimaginable. Her series of poems from PLUME, University of Washington Press, 2012, tell stories of those who lived and worked in Richland's nuclear reactor zone. Flenniken describes the poems, "As nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the empty desert west." Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where she notes, "Every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb."--she worked at Hanford as a civil engineer and hydrologist.

Lusztig closes RICHLAND with an impactful visual of a brief installation from artist, Yukiyo Kawano, displayed along the 600-square-mile shrub-steppe desert across from the Hanford Nuclear site, in southern central Washington, along the Columbia River--traditionally home of several tribes of Native Americans. Yukiyo, born and raised in Hiroshima, a third-generation survivor of the U.S. atomic bomb, presents the installation as a large-sized memorial designed for remembrance, reflection, and to question our role in the atomic bomb era.

Additional Info:
The U.S. developed two types of atomic bombs during the Second World War. The first, Little Boy, was a gun-type weapon with a uranium core. Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. The second weapon, dropped on Nagasaki, was called Fat Man and was an implosion-type device with a plutonium core.

In an article worth reading, in the Asia-Pacific Journal, January 1, 2022, by Ellen Schattschneider and Mark Auslander, "Dwelling on my Falling: Yukiyo Kawano’s Nuclear Vision." A fascinating account of the Yukiyo Kawano's reasoning and creativity of her installations. Crediting photos from Irene Lusztig and Helki Frantzen.