A powerful new documentary delves into the enduring consequences of U.S. military testing, focusing on the profound and often overlooked effects on Indigenous communities and the environment. The film, the result of an intensive seven-year investigation, chronicles the legacy of weapons development across regions of California and Utah.
The journey starts at a decommissioned airbase in Utah, a key training site for the crews who carried out the atomic bombings in 1945. Inside a museum built on the grounds, the camera observes replicas of the historic bombs and other memorabilia. A detached, factual narration of these events plays throughout the space, creating a pervasive and unsettling atmosphere that feels less like tribute and more like a tomb for a troubling past.
A starkly different narrative unfolds around the Salton Sea, a location used for the Manhattan Project. The shoreline is not sand but a graveyard of pulverized plant and aquatic life. As the water retreats, it leaves behind concentrated toxic materials that pose severe health risks to nearby populations. The film powerfully underscores that this is ancestral Native American land, recalling a history where Indigenous tribes were decimated by disease introduced by colonizers. In a poignant turn, their modern-day descendants have found common cause with undocumented immigrants, united as communities marginalized by systemic neglect.
Personal accounts from witnesses are seamlessly woven with evocative visuals of the damaged terrain, from intimate shots of ecological wreckage to sweeping aerial views of parched earth. This fusion turns the landscape itself into a living archive for oral histories. These narratives of displacement, suffering, and cultural loss, frequently absent from official chronicles, are given a permanent voice in this compelling and necessary film.
