Among the Palms the Bomb, or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty

Seven years in the making, the film takes us to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum, a former military base in Utah where atomic bomb testing, assembly, and manufacturing took place, and to the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, now on the brink of ecologic collapse, where local communities try to survive a dystopic reality. The echoes of heavy bombardment testing during WWII and the Cold War blend with the memories of Native American genocide and the current exploitation of illegal immigrant farmworkers. The natural and the human landscape provide a backdrop to indelible trauma, widely ignored and silenced, despite the mere 158 miles distance to Los Angeles.