Mar 11, 2012 from 3:30 PM to 12:00 AM
Film: Atomic Mom
Unitarian Church of All Souls, 1157 Lexington Ave (@ 80th St.), New York
Atomic Mom weaves an intimate portrait of a complex mother-daughter relationship within an
obscure – but important – moment in American history.
As the only female scientist present during atomic detonations in the Nevada desert, Pauline Silvia,
the filmmaker’s mother, undergoes a crisis of conscience. After a long silence and prompted by
her daughter, she finally reveals grim secrets of working in the U.S. atomic testing program.
In our present moment of Wikileaks, Pauline is a similar whistle-blower having been cowed by the
silencing machine of the US military for decades. In an attempt to reconcile with her own mother’s
past, her daughter, filmmaker M.T. Silvia, meets Emiko Okada, a Hiroshima survivor trying to
reconcile her own history in Japan. The film follows these survivors, each on a different end of
atomic warfare, as they “meet” through the filmmaking process, and as they, with startling honestly,
attempt to understand the other.
With the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the footage of the devastation is hauntingly
familiar to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Japan experiences its second nuclear
crisis, Atomic Mom illustrates how we are all downwind of this story.
Atomic Mom invites viewers to confront American nuclear history in a completely new way and will
inspire dialogue about human rights, personal responsibility, and the possibility – and hope – of
peace.
More info at http://www.atomicmom.org
M.T. Silvia is an independent filmmaker. Her first documentary Picardy Drive (2002, Documentary,
57min) aired on KQED’s ImageMaker series, FreeSpeechTV and airs yearly during the holidays on
Oakland’s KTOP. She has worked professionally in the film industry for over twenty years at both
Skywalker Sound and Pixar Animation Studios. Among many mainstream film and CD credits, she
has also worked on several independent films.