A still from Atomic Homefront: Just Moms STL founders Karen Nickel, Meaghan Beckermann, and Dawn Chapman protest the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C.
Fame can raise questions. It’s cool, for example, that two documentary films made in St. Louis, by St. Louisans, were invited into an international film festival.
But they had a hot subject.
This October in Berlin, The International Uranium Film Festival will screen Atomic Homefront, about our very own Coldwater Creek and West Lake landfill contamination, and The Safe Side of the Fence, about the present-day fallout from Mallinckrodt's involvement in the Manhattan Project.
The two St. Louis films join documentaries from Turkey, Canada, India, Switzerland, France, Portugal, Australia, the Marshall Islands, and the U.K., as well as six films made elsewhere in the U.S. Topics include a Japanese farmer cultivating land within the radiation red zone; the old Portuguese mines where Saddam Hussein found enough uranium to try to build a nuclear reactor; the risk that uranium mines on federal public land near the Grand Canyon will permanently pollute its landscape; the conflict in the small, mostly indigenous community of Narsaq, as Greenland considers allowing an Australian company to open a uranium mine in the pristine Kvanefjeld mountain, site of one of the richest rare earth mineral resources deposits in the world.
More about the St. Louis offerings:
Atomic Homefront, 2017, directed by Rebecca Cammisa, October 12 at the Planetarium in Berlin
Government and corporate negligence led to the dumping of Manhattan Project uranium, thorium, and radium, thus contaminating North St. Louis suburbs along Coldwater Creek and adjacent to the West Lake-Bridgeton landfill. Meanwhile, in 1973, approximately 47,000 tons of the same legacy radioactive waste was moved from Latty Avenue and was illegally dumped into a neighborhood landfill named West Lake. This landfill became an EPA Superfund site in 1990. For the past seven years, an uncontrolled, subsurface fire has been moving toward an area where the radioactive waste was buried. Atomic Homefront shows citizens confronting state and federal agencies, demanding to know the truth as they fight to keep their families safe.
The Safe Side of the Fence, 2015, directed by Tony West, October 10 at Cinema Kulturbrauerei
World War II's Manhattan Project required the refinement of massive amounts of uranium, and St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Chemical Works took on the job. Its employees would become some of the most contaminated nuclear workers in history. This documentary explores that legacy: the workers who became ill and the challenges of dealing with the nuclear fallout. St. Louis was a prototype, but more than 300 facilities across America joined the race to build the bomb, and communities are still dealing with the repercussions.
This post has been updated to reflect a change in the festival schedule.
