LOCAL News :: Civil & Human Rights
"Trespassing" documentary film at Santa Cruz Film Festival
Trespassing is an evocative meditation on the ability of a war culture to bring itself to the brink of annihilation while simultaneously producing “gatekeepers� to combat that annihilation.
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Eight years in the making, Trespassing is a feature-length documentary that poetically examines our fight for survival. By focusing on the battle around nuclear storage in the United States, the film carefully unpacks a deadly controversy around land rights, uranium mining, nuclear testing and the disposal of nuclear waste. Filmed in and around Native American sacred sites in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, Four-Corners and California’s Mojave Desert, Trespassing captures the breathtaking beauty of the natural environment, while documenting the actions of indigenous people and others as they risk relocation, eviction and arrest to prevent further desecration of these lands, the air and the water by nuclear waste.
In revisiting the consequences of U.S. nuclear policy, Trespassing reveals a common thread in the lives of its protagonists, demonstrating how the actions of the past resonate in the present. The film introduces a range of perspectives, including Stewart L. Udall (former Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson), Corbin Harney (Western Shoshone spiritual leader), Steve Lopez (Fort Mojave Indian and Coordinator for the Native Nations Alliance), Anthony Guarisco (Director, Alliance of Atomic Veterans) and Dorothy Purley (Laguna Indian and former uranium miner). Each story adds a layer of humanity to this evocative mediation on the ability of a culture to bring itself to the brink of annihilation while simultaneously producing "gatekeepers" to combat that annihilation.
Trespassing offers an in depth and provocative examination of historical survival and struggle designed to impact the present generation and alter a deadly course of action.