Life or death?

This week I should have liked to have been in Window Rock, Arizona.  I should particularly like to have been there on Tuesday to see the film, Ground Zero -Sacred Ground. It shows Three Rivers, an ancient rock art site, where over 10,000 petroglyphs were created by the Jonada Mogollon people between 900 and 1400 AD. There are birds, fish, humans, insects and plants, as well as geometric designs, found over an area of 50 acres of the Northern Chihuahuan Desert. There are trails to walk and campsites where you can stay to see them for yourself.
Some  thirty five miles away, however, is the Trinity nuclear test site, now called the White Sands Missile Range. This lies in New Mexico, near the area of the desert aptly named Jornada del Muerto, or "Route of the dead man."
The one desert holds the pictorial  history of man living with nature, the other, a history of its destruction, written in the sand.
This contrast is explored in a description of the film, which can be read at the brilliantly visual website of the Uranium Film Festival. They staged the film's showing along with many others I would have liked to have seen, in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Window Rock, as part of their travelling film festival.
The next festival stopover is also in the USA, in Washington from February 10th-12th.  The festival program is on their website at http://www.uraniumfilmfestival.org/index.php/en/travelling-festival/usa-2014/washington  After that, it travels to New York City on February 14th until February 18th.

What happens when a film is about your life?

On November 27th  the travelling Uranium film festival arrives in the USA.  The main festival takes place each year in Rio de Janeiro, when films from all over the world are entered for the festival. It's the only one of its kind, showing films about nuclear power, uranium mining, nuclear weapons and the health effects of radioactivity. You can find out a lot more from their amazing website.
The first films will be shown in Albuquerque NM, followed by screenings in Santa Fe and Window Rock.  Next year films will be shown in Washington D.C. and in New York City in February.
One of the films is 'The River That Harms'.  Just fourteen weeks after the accident at Three Mile Island, which a great many people have heard about, there was another nuclear tragedy, which I for one, did not find out out about for many years.
When I read that ninety million gallons of liquid nuclear waste and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes burst through a broken dam wall at the Church Rock Uranium Mill Facility, contaminating the Puerco River,  and I had never heard about it, I was bemused.
Many of the people affected were from the Navajo Nation. It was the river they lived by. It was the land that their animals grazed and the water that they drank, and the pools that their children played in....
Now we have films about children who don't play outside in Japan and children whose lives were affected by a poisoned river in the USA. But did their parents ever think it would happen to them, or that a film would be made about them? If the films weren't made, would you know about them?
The uranium that powered the plants in Fukushima, apparently, came from mines in Australia, but I also read of protests and long protest marches by Aboriginal people along with international protesters against the mining of uranium  http://indymedia.org.au/2013/05/10/wgar-news-walkatjurra-walkabout-stepping-out-against-uranium-mining-wanfa-anawa
 Our children, your children, have the right to be in happy films in a bright future.  It's up to us to see that this happens.