"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
- Winston Churchill, 1943
Winston Churchill, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, made these remarks to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference, a meeting between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in the latter stages of World War II. Churchill intended it to mean that covert and deceptive tactics of war were a necessary tool of achieving military success. Churchill marveled at the Soviet’s utilization of “dummy” tanks, aircrafts, and airfields, and radio deception. He and the leadership of the Allies may not have known just how much this quote would ring true in other aspects of life too.
As Churchill’s astute observation illustrates, this phenomenon is not new. Just as much as he’s talking about military tactics, Churchill easily could have made those remarks about the foe the Allies faced. Nazi groups, beginning in 1933, executed public book burnings of texts they considered to be “un-German.” The writing of Jewish, liberal, and leftists authors were blacklisted and confiscated. Sound familiar? Hitler and the Third Reich sought to create a new society buoyed by their own, sanitized version of German history.
Today, misinformation and disinformation run rampant. Fox News, Turning Point USA, the Donald Trump-led MAGA faction, and many others profit off of lies—lies to their audience, lies to themselves, or perhaps both. It has completely taken over American society, from the political to the interpersonal. As I type, presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis and other governors like him are doing everything they can to ban history from libraries and public schools, a literal representation of the truth being guarded by lies. This theme resonated with me as I watched a new documentary from filmmaker Irene Lusztig, at the first annual DC/DOX Festival held last weekend in Washington, D.C.
Richland tells the history of its namesake, the city that formerly belonged to the Wanapum, Yakama and Walla Walla native tribes in southeastern Washington state. The U.S. Army evicted the tribes to create a community that would become a worksite for the Manhattan Project—the research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons during WWII. It was named Hanford Engineering Works; workers and their families would later refer to it simply as “the Hanford site.”
The Hanford site was home to the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor. The plutonium developed at Hanford was used in the first atomic bomb tested and in the “Fat Man” atomic bomb that was used against the people of Nagasaki effectively ending the war. Through extensive research, Lusztig painstakingly retells this dark moment in American history, which perhaps on its own would have been a compelling History Channel-like documentary. But I was much more intrigued by the rest of Richland.
Lusztig, alongside the film’s gifted cinematographer Helki Frantzen, reveal what life is like in modern-day Richland over a half century after its peak utilization by the U.S. Government. The city and its population are still dealing with the effects of the Hanford site on their health and their collective moral conscience. There’s still a hesitancy to swim or fish in the river surrounding the city or to cultivate plants in the soil. A majority of the people of Richland are proud of its history: the local high school’s mascot is “the Bombers;” there are regular parades and celebrations commemorating the atomic bomb; and there’s no appetite to change it. On the other hand, there’s a growing segment of the population, in many ways led by the city’s youth, to distance itself from the destruction dealt as a result of their family’s labor. Both sides reckon with the environmental hazards left behind by the years of nuclear proliferation.
Richland is a sobering story backed by four poems read by Richland residents from Plume, a collection of poetry written by Kathleen Flenniken. Flenniken herself grew up in Richland next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father [she] knew disappeared to fuel the bomb.” Many of those fathers and the other folks who worked at the Hanford site succumbed to radiation-induced illness, despite official assurances to workers and their families that their community was safe. Lusztig interviews subjects dealing with the devastation of declassified documents revealing the hazardous levels of contamination those workers faced and the deception used to hide it. The people of Richland are walking contradictions, both proud of what their parents and grandparents accomplished while coming to terms of what future they may soon face.
One of the poem readers, Carolyn Fazzari, read the poem titled “Carolyn’s Father,” a piece written in honor of her father. A teary Fazzari explained how grateful she was to live in a place like Richland while describing the sacrifices her father made to ensure his family was taken care of. In one of the most emotional interviews of the film, Fazzari described how her father wouldn’t hesitate at offers for extra pay in exchange for running into radiation-dense rooms for various tasks. Another resident of Richland spoke about the breadth of information the US Department of Energy kept on Hanford workers; documents showed what building they worked in, how much radiation they were exposed to, and so much more damning detail. It’s insidious.
Another compelling interview was of Wanapum Chief Rex Buck Jr., who told another tale of deception. When government officials came to buy the land belonging to the Wanapum tribe, they told Buck Jr.’s father and grandfather that the Hanford site would be a temporary project and that the land would soon be able to be reclaimed. Most of the site in the current day is uninhabitable due to the toxic levels of radiation. Buck Jr. passed away in 2022, remembered as a protector of the Wanapum and native culture.
Richland culminates in an intervention made by Lusztig. Throughout the film, many of the subjects interviewed lacked the sympathy and empathy for the destruction wrought on Nagasaki. Unbeknownst to the audience, Lusztig brings in Yukiyo Kawano, a visual artist and third-generation hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) whose art is inspired in large part by the atomic bomb. The film’s cinematographer Helki Frantzen told the DC/DOX audience that while Kawano had been commissioned to do a piece for the Hanford Reach National Monument, she was brought to many community events as a counterbalance to the rest of the film.
The choice to bring Kawano in, which was not mentioned in the film, was a risky one. Typically documentary filmmakers see themselves as impartial journalists documenting their subject. However, I agree with Lusztig, Frantzen, and the film’s producers choice. It was necessary in my opinion to get an outside view from someone affected by the bombings. I only wish Lusztig mentioned it as a note in post-production—if there’s time, it would be a great inclusion.
Either way, Richland is a must-see documentary. It’s a story distinctly about the city and people of Richland but also one about the human capacity for deception. It’s about the stories…the lies we tell ourselves about the past and how it affects us in the present. Add in Frantzen’s rich, visual text and it makes for a film that’s hard to look away from.
News coverage about the book banning and other attempts to distort U.S. history are often met with cries that the acts are “un-American;” this film debunks that narrative. The truth of what happened in Richland and at the Hanford site, both the hazardous nature of the worksite and the devastation of the fruit of that labor unleashed in Japan, has been cloaked in lies starting with the ones told by the U.S. government to the native tribes and to the workers who put their lives in danger at Hanford. Richland succeeds in unraveling them.
With Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer coming out in theaters next month to tell one side of the nuclear proliferation story, Richland is the perfect companion film to counterbalance it. Will you watch it?