Thankfully, Lusztig resists the temptation to make old film segments salacious. There are no blooming mushroom clouds, no charred devastation. Richand is a movie about a small town with a tough past and a future that’s up to God, Mother Nature, and politicians. Locals raise their voices, but this place is the Effect of Larger Causes.
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Gloved hands shove a wad of roots under a hole in black mulch, taking care to leave the top of the tiny plant exposed to the prairie. The worker takes two steps, pokes another hole. It’s a silent waterless attempt to reintroduce native plants to the area around the contaminated zone.
A supervisor in a parka explains, “This is not a contaminated zone. We don’t work in contaminated zones. We wouldn’t risk that exposure.”
The opening scene of Richland, the new documentary feature by British-American nonfiction filmmaker Irene Lusztig (Motherhood Archives, Yours in Sisterhood) and producer Sara Archambault (Riotsville, U.S.A.), sets up a solid premise. We are small cogs. How much responsibility should we take for what the machine spits out?
Those first moments also establish the land as a character in its own right. You can see why, back in the 1940s, the government picked this area of the Columbia River Basin to build the Hanford Nuclear Facility. It’s flat, but not “Nebraska flat.” There are enough undulating gullies to obscure whatever might be going on behind the next rise.
Trees are rare, but there are plenty of clumps of woody scrub, ankle-busting gopher holes, and, here and there, boulders big enough to shade a den of rattlers. It looks like the movie set of a tumbleweed Western.
Richland, the movie, is an entrant in this year’s Tribeca Festival documentary competition. Richland, the town, is quietly trying to reconcile its complex heritage.
It’s the town that built the bomb. It’s also, as they point out in the documentary, the bomb that built the town.
Richland was a planned community, a government project built in the 1940s to house workers who enriched the weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Families were welcome.
Archival still, Richland alphabet house. Credit: US Department of Energy Hanford Collection
The (almost all white) folks who came to south central Washington to work in the nuclear facility were likely stirred by a mixture of patriotic fervor, a sense of adventure, and the prospect of a steady paycheck.
Lusztig, who is known for her in-depth research and effective use of archival footage, lets Richlanders, for the entire 1-hour and 33-minute film, speak for themselves. Thankfully, Lusztig resists the temptation to make old film segments salacious. There are no blooming mushroom clouds, no charred devastation. Richand is a movie about a small town with a tough past and a future that’s up to God, Mother Nature, and politicians. Locals raise their voices, but this place is the Effect of Larger Causes.
Long before this “600 square miles of scrub steppe along the Columbia Falls River” became the Hanford Nuclear Site, it was the home range of the Wanapum, Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce peoples. The sparse population had long become accustomed to unfair edicts and broken promises by the time the government showed up with blueprints for a bomb plant.
Today Richland is home to 60,000 residents and 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste. According to the film, it’s “the largest environmental cleanup project in the world.”
Here’s the rub: you can’t clean up radioactive plutonium.
A little prairie clover and milkweed take root along the edges, but the most contaminated areas of the Hanford site will remain dangerous for a long, long time. Folks in the film say it will take “millions of years,” but scientists say the expected half-life of Hanford’s radioactive plutonium is about 25,000 years.
Lusztig chooses to let the locals remain somewhat anonymous as well as scientifically inaccurate. The audience determines who people are by inference, casual reference, or circumstance: there are former Hanford employees, descendants, teachers, retirees, Native peoples, and high school students. Their unwashed, uncensored point of view is the point of this documentary.
An interesting thing happens in the absence of a narrator or on-screen interviewer: viewers begin to knit a narrative with their inner voices. There are touchstones for those of us who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, for anyone who experienced small-town America, and especially for someone like me, who grew up during the Cold War, in a Montana town that was surrounded by 150 nuclear warheads (made in Hanford).
No one disputes that Hanford’s reactors produced weapons-grade plutonium, including the radioactive explosive that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. That legacy includes the Richland High School’s mascot, the “Bombers,” and an annual celebration of the Manhattan Project dubbed “Atomic Frontier Days” that includes parades with fancy floats, performances by local dance troupes in sequined outfits, and picnics.
High school students talk outside of Richland High School. Credit: Helki Frantzen
People are proud enough to show up at a celebration of the town’s history but thoughtful enough to swallow hard at their past. “We did an amazing, terrible thing,” one man says, “but people dropped the ‘terrible.’”
A retired couple on lawn chairs enjoy the annual festivities. “We don’t glow in the dark,” the wife says, a little defensively. She pauses and adds, “but we don’t eat any fish out of the river. People do,” she admits with a slight shudder. “They swim in it too.”
“We didn’t start the war,” another man says, “We just finished it.”
Later in the film, a soft-spoken Native Elder sits on a chair in his front yard, surrounded by family. In the 1940s, the Wanipum people were asked if they’d sell their land to the government. According to this Elder, the tribe replied, “We can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to our kids and grandkids.” The government changed tactics. “You guys come back when we’re done. We’re not going to use it all that long.” With a palpable lack of rancor, and a sad resignation for the fate of humanity, the Elder continues, “We lost whole families. Maybe the great maker wanted it that way.”
There’s a lot of strategic silence in this documentary. It’s distractingly effective.
Visible pain and early graves notwithstanding, there remains a grudging pride in the area’s atomic accomplishments. Richland High school’s grimace-worthy motto is “Nuke ‘Em til They Blow.”
Archival still, Hanford workers. Credit: US Department of Energy Hanford Collection
“Our mascot is one of the ten most offensive in the nation,” one kid says. “We’re romanticizing nuking people.” The student next to him is more equivocal. “If a group wants to change it, an equal group would oppose it, and nothing would change.”
That kid has a point. The Cold War is over, but we hang onto our nuclear deterrent despite the hazard it poses to humanity. Like a rhizome, the danger spreads, mostly unseen, and perhaps unstoppable. Is self-destruction inevitable?
A woman who experienced tragic loss stands in a cemetery and reminisces.“I think we had the most wonderful childhood,” she sighs.
That woman’s father worked in “the cannery,” shaving metal rods to fit into tubes. She says — and archival footage shows —there was no protective equipment. The air was filled with filings. Volunteers would “duck into the reactor” to clean it for extra pay. “My dad never said no,” the woman, who is about sixty-five, controls her emotions. “It was hazardous to drink local milk, eat locally grown vegetables, or eat locally caught fish. We fished all the time. Dad was a duck hunter, a deer and elk hunter. We grew vegetables in our backyard.” Before he died of myelodysplastic syndrome at age 59, this proud worker, who never “spoke ill” of Hanford, told his daughter, “I think I trusted the wrong people.” Four American flags along with red, white, and blue flowers decorate his grave.
The music in this documentary is consistent with the Lusztig insistence on maintaining a local perspective. At a coffee shop with his buddies, a retired teacher rumbles out a few bars of a local folk ballad, “Termination Winds.” Later, two talented locals, one with a banjo and another with a guitar, stand in the middle of a gravel road and sing the entire lament about battered Souls amid the sagebrush.
There’s also a poignantly filmed rendition of a large local choir singing lyrics etched in the Bhagavad Gita but often credited to the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” As the camera pans out, the audience sees the choir is performing in (what we presume to be a safe part of) the defunct Hanford building, in front of about 2,000 metal rods, stacked about 30 feet high.
Fat Man (Folded) sculpture by Yukiyo Kawano, Hanford Reach National Monument.
Credit: Helki Frantzen
Richland closes with another quiet segment that connects people to the land. Two women assemble a fabric sculpture that billows in the dry breeze: it’s a large fabric re-creation of Fat Man, the nickname given to the bomb that dropped on Nagasaki, made by a third-generation Hiroshima survivor (Yukiyo Kawano). When I looked it up later, I discovered it had been sewn together with hair from the artist’s head.
Lusztig could have made a soapbox documentary about how people were wiped off the planet by bombs that were made in the USA (they were), how a huge swath of land will forever be poisoned (it will), how workers’ families were carelessly exposed (that happened), and how Native Peoples have suffered horribly (they have), but the filmmaker let the people of Richland tell their story, in their own words.
It was an “amazing, terrible thing.”
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All images are courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival and the film’s production company.
