Documentary About Atomic Bomb Survivors in Santa Fe Film Festival and
Inspired by two atomic bomb survivors who traveled to Los Alamos in 2005, Jordan McKittrick, a 15-year-old high school student in Santa Fe, has made a film in which he documents their visit to the birthplace of the bomb.
The film, titled Help, if I may ask, tells the stories of Masako Hashida and Ueda Koji, two Japanese atomic bomb survivors. Masako Hashida was 15 years old in 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. She was only a half a mile from the blast. Ueda Koji was 3-years-old when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
McKittrick filmed Hashida and Koji for four days while they visited New Mexico and toured Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). "The survivors weren't angry," McKittrick said. "That's the thing that stood out most for me about filming them."
The film also includes footage from the 2005 August 6th commemoration, which is held annually in remembrance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings at Ashley Pond Park in Los Alamos.
McKittrick has lived most of his life in northern New Mexico. Living so close to LANL, nuclear issues have always been on his mind. He stated that an intellectual distinction has been made between the activities at LANL and the nuclear weapons that are and have been created there. Through the stories of these two atomic bomb survivors, his film gives an emotional understanding of these activities to show what the full impacts of operations at LANL actually are.
"I want to use my art of film making as a call to action," McKittrick said, "to get this issue into people's hearts and out of their heads."
Help, if I may ask is McKittrick's first film. It will be shown as a part of the Santa Fe Film Festival on Dec. 7 at 1:15 p.m. and Dec. 9 at 2:15 p.m. at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in downtown Santa Fe.
For more information about this film, please visit www.helpifimayask.com.
Public Hearings to be Held about New Nuclear Weapons Proposal
The < a href="http://www.energy.gov">Department of Energy (DOE) will hold four public scoping hearings in New Mexico in early December about their plans to prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for the proposed Complex 2030. Under Complex 2030 DOE plans a massive reorganization and refurbishment of the nuclear weapons complex and a revival of nuclear weapons production with new designs.
Sadaf Cameron, of CCNS, said, "These hearings are the opportunity to bring forth our vision of the nuclear weapons complex in 2030, one where the United States meets its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty agreements by the year 2030, if not before."
The Complex 2030 public scoping hearings will be held this week at four locations around New Mexico. They will be held in Socorro on Monday, December 4th and in Albuquerque on Tuesday the 5th. On Wednesday, December 6th they will be held in Los Alamos in the morning and in Santa Fe in the evening.
For location and time of hearings click here
To learn more about the proposal or submit written comments click here.
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