The culmination of a seven-year research project, Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljanić’s striking, exhaustive film examines the lasting impact of 20th-century military projects on the US landscape. The film begins at the former Wendover air force base in Utah, where fighter-bomber practice runs were held before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Moving through the corridors of a museum erected to commemorate the mission, the roving camera takes in various artefacts, including replicas of the two atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man. Circulating through various monitors and speakers, matter-of-fact narration of these events lingers in the air, lending an omnipresent eeriness. Here lies empty nostalgia, unnervingly entombed.
The ecological devastation that surrounds the Salton Sea, a testing site for the Manhattan Project, tells a different story. What looks like sand is, in fact, the crushed remains of former vegetation and aquatic life. As water levels rapidly recede, toxic waste piles up, with hazardous health effects for local residents. Most poignantly, the film reminds us that this region is, first and foremost, Native American land; close by is the Torres Martinez desert, where the Indigenous Cahuilla tribe was once nearly wiped out by a smallpox epidemic engineered by white settlers. Now, their descendants have formed a close alliance with undocumented migrant workers from south of the border, also victims of state violence.
Testimonials from various interviewees are dextrously entwined with poetic shots of shifting landscapes, which range from closeups of environmental ruins to bird’s-eye views of arid soil. This interplay transforms these images into depositories of oral histories and lived experiences; these stories of exploitation, loss and Indigenous pain might not find a home in the official records, but they live on in this passionate documentary.
• Among the Palms the Bomb is on True Story from 29 August.
