Americium

In New Mexico USA, a group confronts the environmental racism engendered by nuclear research and uranium mining. Fighting against government narratives that conceal this reality in museums and tourist sites, women refuse to be silenced.

Because history and landscape have always been, in the case of the United States, more or less synonymous with another—an aspect Théodora Barat already reckoned with in a previous film (Pay-Less Monument, 2019)—Americium sets out to unearth the layers of time contained in an expansive landscape. The setting: the vast desert plateaus of New Mexico, the sprawling landscape of westerns, virtually unchanged since the Westward Expansion. The story: an account of the Atomic Age and of how it came into being when the first nuclear tests of the Manhattan Project were launched in New Mexico, the global implications of which have received far more attention than the local—and no less significant—consequences here examined by Barat. Initially drowned out by the critical importance of the nuclear issue on a global scale, this tragedy was played down a second time, and continues to be, by sweeping propaganda efforts. The focus of Americium is hence twofold: first the legend, and then the facts—in that order. The legend: what local museums and tourist attractions peddle to visitors flocking to the area, where the story of nuclear technology is told to the patriotic tune of national genius. The facts, patiently recounted in the second part of the film by two residents campaigning to raise awareness about them and to demand justice: the health crisis brought on by nuclear testing and uranium extraction, the brunt of which has been borne by communities all the easier to ignore that they were—and still are—predominantly Native American. This film is confirmation that no part of the country has been spared by the dismal underside of the American Myth: not one landscape, not a single desert.

Jérôme Momcilovic