Events

Nuclear Savage & Sand Wars
Film Screening

Friday January 12, 2018 at 5:30pm
FVIM Screening Room, Emily Carr University (Room D1375)

Please join us for a screening of two films, Nuclear Savage and Sand Wars, in conjunction with our exhibition The Pacific.

Nuclear Savage (2012)

Written and directed by Adam Jonas Horowitz

87 minutes

Adam Jonas Horowitz shot his first film in the Marshall Islands in 1986, and was shocked by what he found there, in this former American military colony in middle of the Pacific Ocean. Radioactive coconuts, leaking nuclear waste repositories, and densely populated slums were all the direct result of 67 Cold War U.S. nuclear bomb tests that vaporized islands and devastated entire populations.

Twenty years later, Adam returned to these islands to make this award winning shocking political and cultural documentary exposé titled ‘Nuclear Savage;’ a heartbreaking and intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for dignity and survival after decades of intentional radiation poisoning at the hands of the American government. Relying on recently declassified U.S. government documents, devastating survivor testimony, and incredible unseen archival footage, This untold and true detective story reveals how U.S. scientists turned a Pacific paradise into a radioactive hell. Marshall islanders were used as human guinea pigs for three decades to study the effects of nuclear fallout on human beings with devastating results. Nuclear Savage is a shocking tale that pierces the heart of our democratic principles.

Sand Wars (2013)

Written and diriected by Denis Delestrac

74 minutes

By the end of the 21st century, beaches will be a thing of the past. That is the alarming forecast of a growing number of scientists and environmental NGOs. Sand has become a vital commodity for our modern economies: we use it in our toothpaste, detergents, and cosmetics, and computers and mobile phones couldn’t exist without it. Our houses, skyscrapers, bridges and airports are all basically made with sand: it has become the most widely consumed natural resource on the planet after fresh water. The worldwide construction boom fueled by emerging economies and increasing urbanization has led to intensive sand extraction on land and in the oceans, with damaging environmental impacts. Sand Wars takes us around the world as it tracks the contractors, sand smugglers and unscrupulous property developers involved in the new gold rush, and meets the environmentalists and local populations struggling to reverse the threat to the future of this resource that we all take for granted.

The exhibition The Pacific considers the Pacific Ocean as a shared and connected space. The exhibition runs until January 14th, 2018.

Image: still from Sandwars (2013)