A documentary film about Richland, Wash., and the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, which debuted during June at the famous Tribeca Film Festival in New York, is about to get screen time in Washington state.
Richland is “a town that produced weapons-grade plutonium for decades, and its citizens have pridefully embraced their identity,” according to a Tribeca description of the 93-minute documentary by Irene Lusztig.
Unlike the Oppenheimer movie, “Richland is concerned not with upper management but with the people who grew up in the burg’s idyllic midcentury sheen of middle-class advancement,” the Hollywood Reporter said in its review of the documentary.
Lusztig is a film and digital media professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Her online bio describes her as a “a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress.”
This month there will be showings of the film in Richland, Seattle, Tacoma and Bellingham, the Tri-City Herald reported Oct. 7. The Tri-Cities Film Festival in Richland, Oct. 13-15 will show the film. There will also be a showing at the Wanapum Heritage Center in Mattawa on Oct. 14.
Lusztig visited Richland in 2015 while working on another project and noticed the mushroom cloud arising from the “R” in the Richland High School logo, the local newspaper reported. Richland High School’s website proudly announces it is “Home of the Bombers!”
DOE cleanup of the Hanford Site started in 1989, and final cleanup might occur in the 2090s.
