Australian Atomic Confessions

Date: Films 2012

Screening: Feature

Director: Katherine Aigner Sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. Eyewitnesses tell the true story of what happend during the 12 British atomic bomb tests in Australia. The film is a chilling expose of nuclear testing and the demaging legacy that continues these day.   Australia, 2005, 49 min, English and Aboriginal Australian   Latin American Premiere   Director's statement

Special Achievement Award

for its brilliant use of visual language, its balance between sacred and profane, and its grounding in Aboriginal reality. The director spent three years among Aboriginal women who transmitted to her the spirit of their ancestral sacred spaces. We learn of ancient "story lines" embedded in the earth's crust, and we hear the myths of a culture brought close to destruction by Cold Warriors blind to Aboriginal reality. Never-before-seen Australian archival footage of Britain's above-ground nuclear explosions is combined with Western and Indigenous witnesses to the country's cataclysmic past, its uranium-impacted present, and its highlevel nuclear waste-prone future. As the film title suggests, Katherine Aiger's first cinematic work goes beyond narrative to capture a dawning national awareness of the value of Australia's Aboriginal roots. Australian Atomic Confessions holds the key to a future for this once pristine country that can honour and begin to heal its vast and imperilled sacred lands.

Robert del Tredici