Special August 2025 Issue
Los Alamos Film Screening
Commemorative Screening of Nagasaki Journey and Dark Circle
SALA Event Center Theater, Saturday, August 9, 2025
25551 Central Avenue, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 505-412-6030
11:30 a.m. Showing of Nagasaki Journey and Dark Circle, followed by Q&A with Producer-Directors Christopher Beaver and Judy Irving.
The third Dark Circle Producer-Director, Ruth Landy, sends her best wishes but will be unable to attend the screening. Los Alamos is the Manhattan Project city organized by Robert Oppenheimer to construct the first atomic bomb.
Full Schedule of Events for Los Alamos Nagasaki Commemoration
Sponsored by New Mexico PeaceFest, Veterans For Peace, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, NukeWatch. Event Coordination, Marcy Matasick.
10 a.m. Vigil and protest in Manhattan Project National Historic Park with speakers and singing by the Raging Grannies
11 a.m. March to SALA Event Center, 2551 Central Ave, Los Alamos, New Mexico
11:30 a.m. Nagasaki Journey and Dark Circle at the SALA Event Center.
Followed by Q&A with filmmakers Christopher Beaver and Judy Irving
2:30 p.m. March back to Manhattan Project National Historic Park
NOTE: The SALA seating is limited. Seats can be reserved for $5 here:
https://sala.losalamos.com/tickets/
Scroll down to August 9 and find the sponsor’s name, NM Peace Festival.
Join the live stream on August 9th
Watch the live stream of the film showing on YouTube on August 9th, starting at 11:30 a.m. US Mountain Time.
International Uranium Film Festival, August 6-15 2025
https://uraniumfilmfestival.org
After the successful presentation of Nagasaki Journey in Rio de Janeiro, May 2025, the International Uranium Film Festival will present Nagasaki Journey globally in English with Portuguese subtitles from August 6 to August 15 on the screening platform at MAM Rio.
Uranium Film Festival Founders and Executive Directors, Marcia Gomes de Olivera and Norbert G. Suchanek announced that Nagasaki Journey received the Festival’s Memory Award.
The Festival’s co-director, Norbert G. Suchanek wrote:
“We had to show the film twice because there were more people, students and teachers than expected, over 300 just from the Faetec state school. Teachers and Students liked the film very much and were deeply impressed.”
Eighty years ago on two separate hot August mornings, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each destroyed by a small atomic weapon dropped by the United States Army Air Forces: Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th.
Nagasaki before the atomic bombing
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were preceded by the first atomic explosion as a test on July 16 in the Alamogordo desert of New Mexico, which resulted in illness and death among the residents and families in nearby communities.
To commemorate these events, special screenings of Nagasaki Journey [Dir. and Prod. Judy Irving and Christopher Beaver] and Dark Circle [Prod. and Dir. by Judy Irving, Ruth Landy, and Christopher Beaver] have been arranged by New Mexico PeaceFest and the Uranium International Film Festival, based in Rio de Janeiro.
We note in particular the theatrical presentation of Nagasaki Journey and Dark Circle at the SALA Event Center Theater in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory where the Manhattan Project produced the first nuclear weapons. The Lab is currently engaged in continuing nuclear weapons development and an expansion of their nuclear weapons production.
The Los Alamos showing takes both films into the heart of nuclear weapons production, a site whose origin story was told in the feature film, Oppenheimer—but a film that for lack of honesty and perhaps lack of courage failed to show the actual effects of the Lab’s atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Japan.
Additional Information about Nuclear Weapons
The Nagasaki Journey film, (Restored Edition), is available on my YouTube channel and on this website.
For an account of the Nagasaki Journey exhibit that premiered simultaneously in New York, San Francisco, and Nagasaki, please go to the website Remembering Nagasaki, designed by Ally Sant and maintained by San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
American nuclear weapons tests were conducted in Alaska, Nevada, Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico and islands in the South Pacific. For further information on the casualties among the people of the American Southwest caused by fallout from nuclear atmospheric testing please go to:
The Human Cost of Atmospheric Nuclear Tests
For information concerning the damage inflicted on Native Americans from uranium mining for nuclear power and nuclear weapons, please go to:
The Antiuranium Mapping Project, created and authored by Shayla Blatchford.
In closing
The frightening capacity of nuclear weapons to end all life on the planet often seems overwhelming. The beginning of the solution is to do something, even taking one step as small as talking about the issues with friends. My one small step for the day is to call on the United States government to institute a policy by which the government pledges never to be the first nation to use a nuclear weapon.
As Judy Irving so eloquently wrote for the closing narration of Nagasaki Journey, she posed a question for future generations, “whether Nagasaki was simply the second city to be bombed or whether it will be the last.”
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