National Emmy Award in News and Broadcasting
Certificate of Special Merit, Academy Awards Committee
Grand Prize US Film Festival (now the Sundance Festival)
Theatrical Re-Release
In a thrilling and timely development, DARK CIRCLE was revived for a theatrical run in Seattle, Washington, twenty-five years after its premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Co-directed by Judy Irving , Chris Beaver, and Ruth Landy, the film focuses on the connections between nuclear energy and nuclear power. Interviews with people living next to the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant and radiation victims from both WWII Japan and America’s bomb-testing provide important personal perspectives on the issues involved. Their comments remain timely and timeless.
A Nagasaki survivor recalls, “I found myself hating not only the war itself, but all the parents who had not opposed it.”
Tom Keogh of The Seattle Times wrote:
While the apparently low-key filmmakers got impressive access to the inner workings of the Rocky Flats plant, the real story they're pursuing takes place a few miles downwind, to a planned community where middle-class families learn the air, water and soil surrounding them is contaminated by astonishingly high levels of plutonium particles.
The film's narrative trail switches back in time to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the thousands of Americans intentionally exposed to nuclear-test radiation. It also hops to California for the famous Diablo Canyon Power Plant showdown between the federal government and anti-nuke activists.
The drama is intense and heartbreaking, no more so than when a particularly outspoken activist visibly implodes with guilt over selling her tainted home to an unsuspecting family so she can get her own kids out of the danger zone.
Film Summary
As timely as tomorrow's headlines, DARK CIRCLE reveals the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In startling footage the film shows how Atoms for Peace have spread nuclear weapons to such as countries as India, Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan: a situation that led us to war with Iraq and even now threatens international peace and stability with Iran and Korea poised to enter the atomic age.
DARK CIRCLE has been called "completely riveting" by Roger Ebert, while People magazine gave the film its highest rating and said, "you owe it to yourself to see this chilling film."
Original music by synthesizer pioneer, Bernard Krause, and Emmy-Award winning composer, Gary Malkin, plus additional music by ECM recording artists, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, and Eberhard Weber.
Photograph: the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, California, taken by and copyright, Karen Spangenberg.