"Australian Atomic Confessions" Received Uranium Film Festival Award
Still of the Film "Australian Atomic Confessions"
Australian filmmaker Katherine Aigner was honoured in Rio de Janeiro last July with a special achievement award of the 2nd International Uranium Film Festival for her feature documentary "Australian Atomic Confessions". "`Australian Atomic Confessions´ received the Special Achievement Award for its brilliant use of visual language, its balance between sacred and profane, and its grounding in Aboriginal reality", said the judge Robert del Tredici, Atomic Photographer and Professor for animated film history in Canada, who presented the Atomic Photographers Guild at the Uranium Film Fesival.
"Katherine Aigner spent three years among Aboriginal women who transmitted to her the spirit of their ancestral sacred spaces. We learn of ancient story lines embedded in the earth's crust, and we hear the myths of a culture brought close to destruction by Cold Warriors blind to Aboriginal reality. Never-before-seen Australian archival footage of Britain's above-ground nuclear explosions is combined with Western and Indigenous witnesses to the country's cataclysmic past, its uranium-impacted present, and its highlevel nuclear waste-prone future. As the film title suggests, Katherine Aigner's first cinematic work goes beyond narrative to capture a dawning national awareness of the value of Australia's Aboriginal roots. Australian Atomic Confessions holds the key to a future for this once pristine country that can honour and begin to heal its vast and imperilled sacred lands."
The International Uranium Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro is dedicated to movies and documentaries about the whole nuclear fuel chain and any nuclear issue: From uranium mining, nuclear power plants, nuclear accidents, atomic bombs, nuclear waste and radioactive dangers. Between 28th of June and 14th of July 2012 the 2nd edition of the Uranium Film Festival screened 54 documentaries, movies and animated films from all continents in the Cinemateca of Rio de Janeiro’s famous Modern Art Museum MAM.
Further Special Achievement Awards of the 2nd International Uranium Film Festival received the films: "Chernobyl, the Invisible Thief" by Christoph Boekel, Germany, for masterfully depicting the Chernobyl catastrophe through multiple perspectives, eventually settling into orbit around David, an artist, soldier, and "Chernobyl liquidator".
"Buried in Earthskin" by Helena Kingwill, South Africa, for for the director's confidence in her native instincts to create a film that follows the route taken by trucks transporting nuclear waste from Cape Towns's reactors to a disposal site in the pristine semi-desert of Namaquiland.
"Radioactive Wolves" by Klaus Feichtenberger, Austria, for its in-depth study of wildlife within Chernobyl's Zone of Abandonment where civilization suddenly stopped, and flora and fauna rushed in where humans fear to tread.
"The Secret and the Sacred: Two Worlds at Los Alamos" by Claus Biegert, Germany, for its incisive capture of the spirit of two opposed but parallel worlds: the world of nuclear weaponsmakers and the world of the guardians of the Earth. These worlds overlap in northern New Mexico around Los Alamos, the birthplace of the Bomb.
"Rokkasho Rhapsody" by Hitomi Kamanaka, Japan, for its delicate handling of the monstrous technological nightmare of the 21-billion-dollar Rokkasho Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plant built in a fishing/farming community in northern Japan.
"Atomic Bombs on Planet Earth", by Peter Greenaway and Irma de Vries (Video design,United Kingdom/The Netherlands, for reminding us of something we have tended to forget, or maybe even not to know: that 2,201 atomic bombs have been exploded on, within, or over our own home planet - which, from Earth's point of view, are not atomic tests at all but preemptive nuclear strikes.
