Environmental workers poke and re-soil the land, working to clean up the now-uncontaminated areas that used to be replete with nuclear material. High school football players take the field for an evening game. Their uniforms, jerseys, and helmets proudly bear the symbol of a nuclear mushroom cloud. This is Richland, a town in Washington State next to the Hanford Nuclear Site from the early 1940s that used to house nuclear government workers at the height of the Manhattan Project. It’s also a town that produced weapons-grade plutonium for decades, and its citizens have pridefully embraced their identity. As one plutonium worker affirms about the mushroom cloud symbol, “People say ‘You need to change that.’ No, we don’t. We don’t need to change it. We don’t look at this as using it to kill people. This is what we accomplished.”

With sobering precision and emotional honesty, filmmaker Irene Lusztig constructs a portrait of an American town at a generational crossroads, its citizens embracing their polarizing origins or reckoning with their past. Lusztig’s Richland dissects a community’s preservation of identity and their views on dominance and security in America.––Jose Rodriguez

Irene Lusztig