International Uranium Film Festival in Santa Fe (11/30 – 12/1) and Window Rock (12/2 – 12/4)

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CCNS NEWS UPDATE

Runs 11/29/13 through 12/6/13

(THEME UP AND UNDER)  This is the CCNS News Update, an overview of the latest nuclear safety issues, brought to you every week by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety.  Here is this week’s top headline:

*  International Uranium Film Festival in Santa Fe (11/30 – 12/1) and Window Rock (12/2 – 12/4)

The International Uranium Film Festival www.uraniumfilmfestival.org/index.php/en/‎ will be held in Santa Fe on Saturday, November 30^th and Sunday, December 1^st at the Center for Contemporary Arts and in Window Rock from Monday, December 2^nd through Wednesday, December 4^th at the Navajo Nation Museum Theatre.  http://www.ccasantafe.org/ and http://www.navajonationmuseum.org/  The press release for the two and a half day Window Rock event explains that the festival “will be held in the homelands of indigenous communities sacrificed by the United States to produce uranium for the bombs of World War II and the Cold War.  Although the Navajo Nation has a moratorium halting new uranium production, there are nearby uranium mining and milling facilities and local transport of radioactive materials happening today and more being proposed as the push for nuclear energy development continues, despite the dangers exemplified by Churchrock and Chernobyl.”

Film festival founder, Norbert G. Suchanek, will be present at the screenings, as well as producers and directors of the films.   The festival highlights over 40 films from 15 countries, which explore not only the radioactive element “uranium,” but also the nuclear industry and resulting effects on local communities.  There will be documentaries, experimental and animated films, fiction and science fiction films and new comedies.

Films by award-winning New Mexico filmmakers will be shown again this year.  In May, New Mexico filmmaker Adam Jonas Horowitz won the Festival’s Yellow Oscar in the Best Feature Documentary category for his “Nuclear Savage:  The Islands of Secret Project 4.1.”  http://www.nuclearsavage.com/  The film documents the crimes against humanity with the atmospheric testing of atomic bombs in the Marshall Islands and how the local populations were used as guinea pigs.

Other New Mexico films include “The River that Harms“ by Producer Colleen Keane http://www.videoproject.com/riv-365-v.html, “Tailings” by Director Sam Price-Waldman http://tailingsfilm.com/, and “Four Stories about Water” by Deborah Begel, David Lindblom, Johnnye Lewis and Chris Shuey http://www.uraniumfilmfestival.org/index.php/en/travelling-festival/usa-2013/albuquerque/thursday-28-nov/413-at-8pm/1033-four-stories-about-water.

After the screenings in New Mexico, the festival will travel to New York City and Washington, DC.

Founded in 2011 in Rio de Janeiro, the International Uranium Film Festival seeks to educate and activate the public and inspires an informed discourse about the health and environmental risks of the nuclear cycle, from uranium mining to radioactive waste storage and disposal.

In May, at the third International Uranium Film Festival held in Rio de Janeiro, founder Suchanek said, “Art, Science, Cinema! These are the three elements that the film festival and the nuclear filmmakers are using [to] explain the unexplainable, to show the invisible. Radioactivity is invisible. It has no color, it has no smell, it has no flavor…  We should know about the risks. …  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Goiânia and Fukushima shall never happen again.”

This has been the CCNS News Update.  For more information, please visit our website at http://www.nuclearactive.org and like us on Facebook.