Containment

Part observational essay filmed in weapons plants, Fukushima, Japan, and deep underground, and part graphic novel, Containment weaves between an uneasy present and an imaginative but troubled distant future, exploring the idea that over millennia, nothing stays put.

Film Signature Image
Series
Independent Lens
Premiere Date
January 9, 2017
Length
90 minutes
Co-Director

Robb Moss

Robb Moss is a filmmaker, professor, and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Moss’s The Same River Twice (2003) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit Award and opened theatrically at Film Forum in New York City. Winning prizes in Nashville, Chicago, New Show more England, and Alabama film festivals, Same River Twice was selected by the Chicago Reader as Best Documentary (and Best Cinematography) of 2003. His autobiographical and essay films, such as The Tourist and Riverdogs, have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Telluride Film Festival and IDFA. He has served as a festival juror at Sundance, San Francisco, Denver, Full Frame, Camden, Seattle, Chicago, New England, and Ann Arbor, and works as a creative advisor at the Sundance Documentary labs. Show less

Co-Director

Peter Galison

Peter Galison is a Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. Galison’s film on the moral-political debates over the H-bomb, Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma (with Pamela Hogan, 2002) has been shown frequently on the History Channel and is widely used in academic courses. In 1997, he was awarded a Show more John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; won a 1998 Pfizer Award for Image and Logic as the best book that year in the History of Science; and in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize. His books include How Experiments End (1987), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), and Objectivity (with L. Daston, 2007). He has worked extensively with de-classified material in his studies of physics in the Cold War. Galison’s work also features artistic collaborations, including partnering with South African artist William Kentridge on a multi-screen installation, “The Refusal of Time.” Show less

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The Film

Can we contain some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? Left over from the Cold War are a hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, covering vast lands. Governments around the world, desperate to protect future generations, have begun imagining society 10,000 years from now in order to create monuments that will speak across time. Part observational essay filmed in weapons plants, Fukushima, Japan, and deep underground, and part graphic novel, Containment weaves between an uneasy present and an imaginative but troubled distant future, exploring the idea that over millennia, nothing stays put.

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