Tribeca 2023 | Richland Interview with Irene Lusztig

I had the opportunity to interview Irene Lustizg, the director and producer of Richland, a documentary that delves into the town's relationship with the Hanford Nuclear Site.

The film tells the town's story through interviews with its citizens and is set to make its world premiere at Tribeca 2023 and will be screened at AMC 19th Street.

Watch the interview using the video player above, listen below, or scroll down to read the transcripted interview.

If you're interested in seeing it, you can purchase tickets at https://tribecafilm.com/films/richland-2023.

Keep an eye out for my upcoming review!

Austin: Hello everyone and welcome to my Tribeca interview with Irene. Let me know if I mispronounce this Lusztig. Irene Lusztig.

Irene Lusztig: Yep..

Austin: She's the director of the documentary. Richland, it's a, it's about a town I would say outside of the Hanford I believe Hanford test site for the Manhattan Project that was producing plutonium for the Manhattan Project.

And what you do in this film is you talk about. You talk with citizens, you also talk with some conservationists that are working to, produce, plant native plants back into the area and a whole bunch of other things. So thank you for making time. We're a week out from Tribeca 10 days out from your world premiere at the festival.

So I just wanna say thank you for taking the time. So, this documentary takes a unique position that I haven't seen a lot of documentaries take. Referring to, you talk a lot about you talk to the citizens a lot more than a documentary usually would. So I'd love if you could give some insight into, How you made that decision in the creative process of making this documentary?

Irene: Yeah, I got, I'm trying to...by citizens you just mean like regular people rather than like experts or is that what you're asking?

Austin: Yeah. The citizens of Richland versus a lot of documentaries would get talking heads, maybe some experts from the testing site and you do Yeah. Talk, talk with some of them, but.

Yeah, let me just

Irene: clarify. It's not a test site, just in case. I think, and I, it's totally fine. I think a lot of, there's, it's actually fairly complicated to understand nuclear stuff. The Nevada test site is where the explosions happen in Nevada, and Hanford was actually a production facility that scaled up production plutonium during World War II, and then continued through the Cold War, but it was production not and actually bombs were not assembled on Hanford.

It was just purely making weapons grade plutonium that then would go into bomb cores that were assembled elsewhere in, in Los Alamos and then excluded in, in Nevada on the test site. So, there's multiple sites that we're involved in weapons making Yeah. I'm, I've been making films for 20 years and I've never been interested in talking heads or that kind of expert interview that you might see a lot in more issues focused documentaries.

But I think the word expert is interesting. I also think people are really experts in their own lives, and I think of. People who talk about their feelings or their lives or how they relate to something as also a kind of, they have a really deep expertise but maybe not one that we necessarily would recognize or expect to hear from.

It's not, I think a lot of nuclear films in particular, I think are very issues focused films and often are like pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear films. And I went into this project very much not wanting to make that type of film that takes a position or advocates for something or like deploys experts to make us believe in a position.

But rather, I think I was really interested in thinking about a space that's really complicated and really messy and where people are bringing really different and contradictory kinds of positions and feelings and experiences and ways of living inside of this really complicated space that's next to this huge nuclear facility.

And yeah, to me that's a lot more interesting, than listening to an expert. And I think, the other thing, when I'm, when I make a film, I think a lot about what can a film do that an article or an essay or a piece of writing can't do? And I feel like, learning about a position is something that is like a great thing for written journalism to do, but to me, not a very interesting thing for a film to do.

So I'm much more interested in how can a film create a space of feeling or give us a sense of what it's like to be in a place or be with a person or be in a landscape in a way that's immersive. So I think all of the things I'm interested in are not the things that talking heads do. But I think, yeah, that's been true of all of my work.

Austin: Yeah. And it's. I think it's a interesting take on it because I did watch another nuclear documentary earlier this year. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's called Downfall, which I think, yeah, Downwind, Downwind, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Downwind. Sorry. It's, yeah. It's early morning for me here, so I'm still like waking up.

Oh, it's okay. So it's ok. I haven't seen that, but I've heard of, I, I read about

it. But yeah, Downwind is very much, that one is about

Irene: the test site I think, right? That's the Nevada test site. Downwinders. Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. And it does take that, anti nuclear testing vibe to it. Which is an interesting way.

We're getting a lot more retrospective. Documentaries on things that happened as I, it's interesting to say, as recently as 19, 19 50, but it does feel recent in, in, in that sense, where I think there's a genre of, oh, we're making th things for example, the first step the documentary that came out earlier this year was about things that were happening now, but we're also looking back in, in some of these documentaries, like what what Downwind is doing and what you're doing with Richland. But yeah I just found that take super interesting. And I guess I want to talk a little bit more about the town. Actually no, I want to talk, you have the citizens read from this book, plume.

Which I believe. And my research is a collection of short stories. It's poetry actually. Yeah, poetry. Yeah. That's it. Yep. Yeah, I actually tried to check it out, but apparently all copies are on hold right now. But but but I wanna ask, what did, how did you find Bloom and how did that, how did you want to interweave that with the stories from the citizens of Richland?

Irene: Yeah, I think so Plume is a, it's a book of poetry written by Kathleen Lenn, who's a Seattle-based poet. But she's actually born and raised in Richland, so she's from Richland. Her parents were Hanford workers. She she actually worked on the Hanford site herself. Early in her career.

She worked as an environmental engineer before she became a poet. So she's had this interesting yeah, career switch, where she Now doing something quite different. But she, yeah, and she's the former poet laureate of Washington State. So I learned about this book pretty early in my research.

The whole book is poetry, basically about Richland and about her childhood growing up there. And it's a book that I think it's quite personal and like a kind of emotional atlas of her reckoning of what it. Feels like and means to try to both remember her childhood in a way that's like fond and nostalgic and nice, but also really reckon with these more violent and difficult things that she then came to learn about Hanford and weapon weapons production and the atomic bombs as she came into adulthood.

So that's what the book is. And the book when I found it felt also really aligned with some of the ways that I like to work. Like it's a book based on a lot of archival research. There's kind of archival documents in the book. But I think I was drawn to it cuz it really felt like it was about feelings.

And really like messy and ambivalent and complicated feelings. And I knew that, that was also the space that I was interested in Richland. I think the questions that drew me to Richland initially were really questions around how people live with a history that's difficult or traumatic or violent, and what it means to, to live with that in the present.

So yeah, the book felt very close to the ideas I was thinking about, but I think the book also gave me a lot of insight into just understanding. How, what it means to both love a place and recognize that a place is has a violent history. And I also, I, so I invited people in the film to read poems from this book.

And people generally chose their own po. Like I would just offer them the book and they would pick which poem they wanted to read. And I like, I think, again, this is something that I've done a bunch in a few different films, but I'm interested in creating moments that are a little more collaborative with people who are in a film where they get to perform or do something or participate in decision making about, what's the poem, how do they wanna read it?

I feel like those collaborative spaces I think shift the power dynamic a little bit of what usually happens in a documentary where you're maybe just pointing your camera at someone. So inviting people to, to participate more actively. But also I think something like reading a poem can just open up a space that's more emotional and more feelings based.

That was hard to do. Around Hanford there's a lot of like engineer and science people and people who just wanna talk about facts and science. So figuring out a way to. Yeah. Make a space that was a little more emotional for people. I think just the book became a, like a conduit or a way to do that.

Austin: Yeah. I think a good example of that is there's a poem about a mosquito truck. And from the poet's point of view there, there's. You talk about that personal recognize reconciling the good and bad of childhood. The person reading it is like, all right, I, ran into r rode our bikes into it for as long as we could stand, and then I'd smell the T-shirt.

That sw I think he it as like a sweet, sugary smell to it. And would sniff it. But then, the poet. Goes into here's also the bad things that happened because of this that we didn't know until I, I think decades later or something like that.

Irene: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a good exa, I think, yeah, that's a thing that like, literally it's very toxic but it's attached to this really like warm, nostalgic childhood memory.

Yeah, I think the book makes a space for people to reflect on that in a way that's more complicated. And yeah. Kathleen, also the, so Kathleen the poet who wrote that book, I also met really early in the process of working on the film. I reached out to her after I found her book. And she yeah, became someone I reached out to pretty regularly as I worked on the film, just to check in and almost get an emotional read on like how, what I was seeing and what I was noticing and if that mapped onto kind of her understanding of the community.

And she's also, she's coming to Tribeca, which is exciting. Oh, that's, so she's gonna also, yeah. So she's excited to be part of the screen now. That's

Austin: gonna be fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, going back to the reflection, I think you leave a, there's both positive sides of the aspect where people are, very proud of their town's heritage.

Where, the Richland Bombers is the high school mascot, if you wanna say. And there's a discussion made about that. But then there's also people, I don't remember her name off the top of my head but there's a scene where this woman's walking through a street and she's yeah, I realize these things were great in the time, but here's also how it hurt us as people.

And I wanna talk about how you wanted to. I guess balance though the, all of the different sides of the story of Richland.

Irene : Yeah, I mean that saying is like something that's harmful, but you don't wanna look at it or you can't look at it until later. Like to me, that's actually a very,

Like very universal, I think.

It's not richlands. I don't know, like you could think of climate change that way. Like every time you, I don't know, get on a plane or order something from Amazon, you're like not looking at something that could be a consequence or a harm. And I think it's very hard to hold the magnitude of all of the consequences of all of the things especially when you grow up in a place and things are normalized.

So yeah, that moment in the film is a good example I think of something that runs throughout the film of. Yeah, just how people hold space for boasts yeah, like what people are willing to look at and not look at how does denial work? How does why does it happen? Why, yeah. Why do we choose to see certain things and not other things?

Austin: Yeah, for sure. And I wanna talk a bit about I, I guess how did you. Come to this project and choose Richland as your next doc subject of your documentary.

Irene: Yeah. I had been to Richland in 2015 for about a day, and that was because of the previous film that I made. Which is quite different in some ways.

But it also involved performance. It was a film based on letters written to the editor of a magazine in the 1970s. And I had this huge archive of letters that were sent from all over the US 40 years ago. And the project was basically finding people in the same communities today who would read these letters aloud and respond to them.

And So also moving between the past and the present. But it was a film that I filmed in 32 different US states. So I was doing these huge road trips to different places. And in the process of making that film, I had found a letter from Richland that was written by a daughter of Hanford workers who had died of cancer.

So that was basically how I found my way to Richland was during this process of filming in all different places So I was in Richland for a day and was looking for someone to read this letter and got connected to Tricia Kin, who's the woman who's also in Richland, who's in the baby graveyard talking about.

Having lost her brother. She's actually, she's a kind of more, she's the most activist person I think in the film. She actually is a downwind activist. Anyway, so she read this letter in 2015 and that project also was pretty collaborative, where I would invite people to, to choose where they wanted to be filmed and what the frame would look like.

And she actually took me behind Richland High School to that huge wall where there's like the 40 foot mushroom club that you see in Richland. So that was my one day there. I just saw the huge mushroom cloud and met Tricia. But I think just really couldn't get Richland out of my mind over, over the next few years.

And especially, as the Trump election happened and as more and more kind of visible forms of US nationalism and white American conservative politics really yeah, we're just visible in, in new ways. I think Richland was a place I really. Wanted to explore as a case study for kind of understanding Yeah.

Like what it means to be proud of the US and what do you need to like, not look at, or what are the blind spots around, like being patriotic. So yeah, I think those were the questions that took me there, but it was totally random that I was just there for a day and I hadn't heard of it before.

Austin: Yeah. To your last point I feel like I'm giving away the entire film at this point, but There's a scene where a veteran sings a, I guess you'd call it a war song, that would, that is, both, you see it from both sides, on one side of the frame the veterans singing the song very proudly.

And then I think it's the sun correct me if I'm wrong there.

Irene: They're fr Yeah they're cri cried friends. Yeah. But yeah, he's older than, he's he's 96 and the other guys are maybe 20 years younger. But yeah, there,

Austin: yeah there's this interesting moment where he's Hey, I don't want you to sing that song.

I don't, please don't. And I just thought that was an interesting moment because I think it conveys, I think what the documentary is trying to do, it's trying to show again the the what the pride people have in their heritage, the bad. That's seen now of nuclear fallout and what that can do and that kind of retrospective kind of nature that we're going into now with the Manhattan Project and things like that.

But then there's that in between where the o other two people on the other side of the table are just sitting there and just, listening. And I think that's an interesting aspect of the documentary. I don't think I've watched a whole lot of documentaries that have have purposely done specifically that and it was honestly just speaking as a member of the press to or what, whatever you want to call me at the whole virtual thing is interesting, but. I was having while watching the film. I was just like, oh, wow this, I was having this entire journey that I haven't had with a documentary before, and I thought that's super interesting for someone to have because again, going back to what you normally see, a documentary you'd see a lot of those talking head interviews, maybe some archival stuff.

In here you show some archive footage of John F. Kennedy visiting Richland. I believe it's in 50, not 57, 60 I forget. 60 exactly. 63 6. 1963. Yeah. And I literally had to look it up because I'm like, I think one of my notes was there's no way somebody handed the president of the United States, the uranium tips Rod.

But I, the JFK library confirmed it. I looked up the transcript and everything. It's wild. And I don't think I've had that journey with a documentary before. I, other than, some of the more sensational words like, can you believe this happened with I watched the fa, our father this week, weekend on Netflix, and that's much more on the, can you believe this happened?

Rather than taking that narrative journey that I think. A lot of, I think, documentaries miss out on. But but yeah, I just wanna commend you for that and I'm gonna go watch your other documentary because I'll be super interested to see what the connective tissue is. In fact, I'll probably do some this week.

But yeah, I, and then Tribeca is in a week. It's fast, fast approaching, and I'm asking a bunch of other people, I'm interviewing this same question or very of the same question. I always think it's interesting to experience a festival from the fact that you already made this maybe a year or two years ago, and now you're showing it to people.

So I guess what is your feeling going into Tribeca and what do you want to for people to. Get out of Richland when they potentially go see it at Tribeca.

Irene: Yeah, I think some of the things you've already mentioned, like just making a space for people to think about some questions or inhabit a space that's a little bit complicated.

I think also, so I worked really closely with the community and I feel as a maker really invested in. Like what it means to portray a community to like an outside audience, which I think Tribeca is largely not gonna be people from Richland or maybe people who've never heard of Richland. And I think it's, I important to me to just make a really complex portrait of the space.

I think especially with Richland, I think there's a long history of just feeling misunderstood. And I think the kind of film you were describing where it's oh my God, look at this crazy sensational thing that happened. Like a lot of work about Richland has been like that. Can you believe they have a mushroom cloud?

Can crazy nuclear town usa. I think there's been a lot of journalism and then work around Richland that, that has that vibe. That I think people from the community don't feel good about. So I think to me actually, it feels really important just to share this community in a way that's more complicated and more layered and yeah, it just gives people a more to think about.

And yeah, if people from the community like the film, that means like a whole lot more to me than any other audience. And they, mostly people from the community who've been really supportive and excited so far. And there's some Richland people coming out. So yeah, for me that, that's the fun part is really just including the community and the screening and hopefully having it feel like a good experience.

Austin: Yeah. I hope it is. And I just wanna make a quick note of something you said. I think being true to a community is the best thing a documentary can do because, I won't go into all the tenets of a documentary here that's gonna be way too long of an interview. But but no, it just, I think there's a version where you could make a, that sensationalist thing where you're talking about, and, but it's not honest.

And I think of all things the documentary has to be, Even when it's not pretty. So yeah. I do hope people watch this at Tribeca. It's playing. Your role Premier is Sunday, June 11th at 2:30 PM I believe all these times are Eastern at a, and they're all at am M c 19th Street on East sixth. Then you've got Monday, June 12th at 6:00 PM and then Wednesday, June 14th at 8:15 PM.

So if you're in New York or if you're flying to New York I really hope you check this out. It's one of the better documentaries I've seen from the festival, although that's probably not saying much. I haven't seen a lot of documentaries, but I really do think this is something people should see, even if they're just curious about it.

Because I've seen a lot of hidden gems. And I know it's early, if we're a week out from Tribeca, but I think this is gonna be the hidden gem documentary of the festival in my opinion.

Thank you. Thank you for taking the time yet again, and I hope you have a great Tribeca. Thank you. Nice to talk to you. Nice to talk to you too.

Until next time!

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