Working with an all-female crew “makes a big difference in terms of the kind of intimacy we were able to build with people,” director Irene Lusztig told us about her outstanding Richland, unveiling the most hidden side of the Manhattan project.
Irene Lusztig had an important story to share with audiences and that was exploring the town of Richland. Her brand-new film, Richland had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. The film dives into the world of this small town to explore the extreme and dangerous effects and how it played a major factor in the Manhattan Project. This important documentary comes on the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest film Oppenheimer, a film exploring the development of the atomic bomb. I had the exclusive interview with Lusztig to discuss her direction, connecting with people of the town, and what it was like working with an all-female crew.
“I am really drawn to making work about […] history, but where history feels like it is really in the present tense and people are still grappling with something or negotiating with something.”
Kristin Ciliberto: Congratulations on the film! It was a very thorough investigated documentary. I was very fascinated by it. What made you want to explore the subject matter and the people of Richland?
Irene Lusztig: Yeah, so I spent time, and I went to Richland in 2015 for the first time when I was shooting a different project that was like a road trip project where I was traveling across the US and spent just a day there. If you go to Richland, all the nuclear culture stuff is immediately on the surface. So, it’s very visible and very apparent. There’s the atomic bowling alley and restaurants that are nuclear themed. The person I met there when I was filming who’s also in Richland was Tricia, the woman who shows the baby graves in the film. She led me behind the high school and showed me the huge mushroom cloud on the back wall that’s in the film. So, I became very curious. I think I’m really drawn to making work about spaces, work about history, but where history feels like it’s really in the present tense and people are still grappling with something or negotiating with something. So that was kind of the beginning of having questions and being curious and doing a lot more reading and research. One thing I think I haven’t been saying in the interviews is it’s such an important American story. I think people really don’t know it very well. It’s the most hidden side of the Manhattan Project and it was built by design to be hidden. It was a secret city in the 40s and I think it still retained a lot of that feeling of being tucked away in this desert land that is kind of ignored and not thought about. The work that happened there was really the beginning of the atomic age and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads during the Cold War were made with Hanford plutonium and the land is now some of the most contaminated land in the world. I think it’s just a really important part of history and an important story.
“It is the most hidden side of the Manhattan Project and it was built by design to be hidden.”
KC: It’s such an important story because I didn’t know much of this going into the film. Is there someone you connected with in Richland like the families or any of the children that were there?
IL: I think I made a lot of meaningful relationships. It was a four-year project, and I spent a lot of time in the community. It’d be hard to just name one or two people, but I think I made meaningful connections and relationships, including people who are not in the film. There’s a local archive that’s called the Hanford History Project. It holds a lot of the artifacts that were found on the nuclear site or came out of the nuclear site. The archivist there has just been an incredible Hanford mentor and friend and taught me a ton about the community. The people were incredibly generous, I think once they felt comfortable with what I was doing and that I wasn’t there to sensationalize or make fun of them or criticize them, but that I was doing something kind of more, more listening centered and more respectful. Yeah, people were super generous.
KC: I was fascinated how everyone opened up to you because there is so much that you explore here. I feel Richland is a warm and inviting with nice people, but there’s just the serious, sad subject matter that they’re living in this toxic walking ground. How was different from your previous works?
IL: Yeah, I mean Yours in Sisterhood (2018) was not as immersive in the same way because I was traveling around a lot. My kind of immersive research was in the archive that kind of framed the project, but the actual shooting was like spending time in small amounts of time in lots of places. This was much more of a deep process of relationship building over time and just getting more and more deeply into different aspects of the community. This is one of my first films that I didn’t shoot myself. It was much more of a collaborative project in terms of bringing in other people and working closely with Helki Frantzen, the cinematographer, and with Sarah Archambault, the producer. The project felt more collaborative, more extensive in terms of who I was bringing into the project and who was working on it.
KC: What did you learn most from making this documentary?
IL: I learned so much! I didn’t know very much about this subject at the beginning, and there was a lot of deep background learning that I had to do before I could even start shooting just to even fill in a lot of knowledge about nuclear history, about the Manhattan Project history, about the history of Richland, about how plutonium is made, what the industrial process looks like, how nuclear cleanup works, and how contamination works. There is tons of research you don’t see in the film. Of course, there’s stuff that I cut out that I spent a bunch of time with. There’s a Department of Health Radiation office in Richland where their job is to constantly sample the city by taking air samples, water samples, and they map the wind every day so they know where stuff would go if there was some kind of accident or disaster. They sample soil which was incredibly fascinating to learn about how that type of monitoring happens, lots of science learning. I think a lot of people who watch the film do not realize that before watching the film. A story that I think is really a case study, it’s not so different from a coal town where people have coal and coal is their livelihood and then it’s harmful to them in a direct way. So yeah, I think it’s a very specific story and a story with a broad kind of relevance.
“Plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life. It’s never going to be finished. […] And a lot of the nuclear waste right now is in these concrete tanks that are embedded in the ground and you know they’re leaking.”
KC: What do you think is left for the future of Richland? Do you think the government will take some more control and take full responsibility?
IL: It is still really a government funded town, which is interesting, and it’s funny, some of the journalism I’ve read makes it sound like a coal town, and everyone left after the plutonium production stopped and there’s just a few people left, but it’s thriving, it’s a large and growing town. Many of the people who used to work in plutonium production now work in cleanup. They’re still out on the site working in the nuclear industry, but just cleanup instead of production. Also, there is a lot of funding. There are just billions of dollars of federal funding for Hanford cleanup that is this kind of forever stewardship project. Plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life. It’s never going to be finished. It’s decades behind schedule and a lot of the nuclear waste right now is in these concrete tanks that are embedded in the ground and you know they’re leaking. They have a 40-year design life and they’ve already been here for way more than 40 years. There isn’t a good technology to help with the situation and deal with nuclear waste which is still not settled science yet. Right? I think it’s just going to be ongoing for a long, long time and I think that’s another reason why it’s so important to know what happens there and to kind of understand what that work is and what that looks like because it concerns and affects all of us.
“I really identify as a feminist filmmaker and feel really invested in working with female-identified crew members.”
KC: To wrap things up, did you enjoy working with your female crew? I heard there was a 95% female crew and I think that’s awesome!
IL: Yes. Yes, and that’s very much on purpose. I really identify as a feminist filmmaker and feel really invested in working with female-identified crew members. It was wonderful to have a female cinematographer and it’s harder to find. There’s much fewer women shooters, but I think it makes a big difference in terms of the kind of access we could get and the kind of intimacy we were able to build with people. It was really wonderful, and it was great to be able to do that.
This interview took place before the SGA and WGA strike.
Find out about the upcoming screenings of Richland here.
