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Simplicity and the Unexpected

Nagasaki, The Last Station (2025)

 

Unexpected opportunities arise. This past year opened the door for showings of the film Nagasaki Journey (produced in 1995) for this year’s 80th commemoration of the atomic bombings —in New Mexico as a test and dropped on the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The new showings emerged from a living room presentation of Nagasaki Journey that I initiated in my hometown of Santa Fe. That led to a presentation of Nagasaki Journey and the feature documentary, Dark Circle, at a theater in Los Alamos, one block away from where the atomic bomb was assembled to be dropped on Nagasaki.

Word spread. The International Uranium Film Festival requested that they present Nagasaki Journey in Rio de Janeiro, where the film won the Festival’s Memory Prize, and onward with their touring exhibition in Berlin, Window Rock in the Navajo Nation, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

My participation in the Nagasaki Journey activities came out of my own pocket. The presentation in Los Alamos alone required three separate test screenings over the course of three weeks to fine-tune the theater projection system.

During this same time period, I completed a short film that returned to California’s Central Valley to explore the question of why are there no rocks in the Central Valley. Every rock was brought in by a human being. The film, entitled, Tulare – Land Without Rocks, financed again out of my own pocket with the support of modest and always encouraging donations, has been viewed 97 thousand times on my YouTube channel.

The first film in my California water series, Tales of the San Joaquin River, has been viewed 278 thousand times since I launched the channel last December, available around the world at no charge to any viewer.

With this newsletter, I am announcing the release of a new film to my YouTube channel, a continuation of the Nagasaki Journey exhibition, book, and film. Nagasaki, The Last Station, tells the story of a photograph—a photograph taken of a nurse caring for the wounded and dying the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki—and blends this story with the story of the photographer, Yosuke Yamahata, who took the photograph and was the focus of the Nagasaki Journey exhibition.

Expect the unexpected is the theme. And how does one fund opportunities that arise in the moment, without detailed planning months ahead of time—and yet projects that are rooted in the reality of more than fifty years of filmmaking and presenting these films?

I pose that question to myself. And I ask for your support as I look forward to more activity and opportunity with existing films, as well as launching new films in the early stages of development: a film about the creation of Hawaii from lava to forest embracing the human stories of people today, and a film about wild horses that seeks to locate and film simple acts of human kindness toward horses, people, and our environment.

I will be out there working and wonder if you might join me as supporting participants who will receive full acknowledgment for the presentation of existing films and on-screen credit for future projects.

The simplicity in the title of this essay is that your financial contribution addresses a range of challenges for our society and our lives — and will ripple into the world like a stone dropped in a pool of water through the wide-spread sharing and distribution of existing films, and into the future with new films and presentations… often in unexpected ways.

Simply said, the films I make reach people. Please come along for the ride of the existing films and beyond, and wonder with me about what comes next.

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Los Alamos Film Screening

Torii Gate, Nagasaki
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Tulare, Return of the Phantom Lake (2025)

A glimmer of hope. A touch of possibilities. Add a dash of a perspective dating back thirteen-thousand years, season with torrential rains, and the result is Tulare–Return of the Phantom Lake, produced 2025, running time seven-and-a-half minutes.

One of the difficulties when completing a film is knowing when to start and when to stop—and when to continue filming new developments and another chapter?

From the beginning of my filming for Tulare, The Phantom Lake, I had an intuition that the Lake would return, perhaps even return in the form of lake restoration as a reservoir for farming, a wildlife refuge, and a recreational haven. Instead, the powers that be keep insisting on dam construction when to my eyes the dry Tulare Lake bed beckons.

One of the themes I continue to think about with my film work is how the same piece of the earth can mean different things to many different people. Sometimes it seems as if they’re not even describing the same patch of land. As Eileen Apperson said in the film Tulare, The Phantom Lake, how you see the land depends on your intentions for that land.

Tulare, Return of the Phantom Lake is a seven-minute that film told in the words of Archaeologist and Author, Jerry N. Hopkins. As you’ll see, how Jerry views the landscape of the Phantom Lake is very much different from those who farm the Tulare Lake Basin.

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My YouTube Channel

It’s finally up. My YouTube channel, Documentary by Christopher, is alive and well. It’s happening.

On my YouTube channel you will find many of the films featured on our website along with new films from myself and perhaps along the way, a few films from guest filmmakers.

I encourage all your comments and thoughts on the films. I reply to as many comments as possible, as we consider questions both practical and philosophical, political and personal—and together, we enter the place where all of our concerns meet, the endless, boundless, world of motion pictures.

Here is the list of the very first films I put up on my channel:

And this is the entire four-film series The Valley and the Lake. Check out the films and leave a comment. Thank you!

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Bomb Stamps

In 1992 I was in my neighborhood Post Office in San Francisco. As I stood in line, I saw a poster that announced a series of US stamps that would mark the 50th commemoration of World War II. The stamps would be issued ten each year between 1992 and 1995 that depicted wartime events from 1941 to 1945. Only stamps for 1942 were shown on the poster.

Based on my experience co-directing and co-producing the film, Dark Circle, with Judy Irving and Ruth Landy, a film about the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, I began to wonder how the end of World War II would be depicted.

According to many histories and opinions, World War II ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Histories and opinions are divided as well among those who feel the bombs were necessary or not, among those who feel the United States had committed an immoral act and those who believed the bombings were a justified act of warfare that saved lives both Japanese and American.

My question was more simple. How would I depict the end of World War II?

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Remembering Nagasaki

A separate award-winning web-site, Remembering Nagasaki, designed by Alison Sant, established and maintained by San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum, is devoted to the international photographic exhibition, book and film entitled, Nagasaki Journey.

As the Nagasaki Journey exhibit took shape between 1992 and 1995, Rupert Jenkins contacted the San Francisco Exploratorium, founded by Robert Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, to see if the Exploratorium wanted to be involved with our exhibition.

This approach was entirely in the hands of Rupert Jenkins, editor of the Nagasaki Journey book and Exhibition Consultant. Rupert in turn began working with Alison Sant then on staff at the Exploratorium.

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Shimon Attie, Berlin

Shimon Attie, by Timothy Greenfield Sanders

Between Dreams and History tells the story of the artist Shimon Attie as he creates his first work of public art in America. Prior to that installation, Attie, who studied art at San Francisco State College, created works of art in Europe dedicated to the idea of how to make memory visible in the present.

Attie’s breakthrough was his installation in Berlin, The Writing on the Wall. Attie researched photographs of Jews and Jewish businesses that existed in Berlin before their destruction by the rise of Nazi Germany. Attie then projected these images onto the actual buildings where the photographs were taken. Attie then photographed the resulting overlay of images.

The installation consists of the performance aspect of the actual projections, which required several hours to complete at night in extremely cold temperatures and the finished photographs that exist as prints and in Attie’s book, Sites Unseen.

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Welcome to my website!

This is an invitation for you the viewer to begin a cinematic journey with me. We will explore the films I have directed and co-directed. We will consider how films are made, what lessons I have learned, and what tips I can offer. We will visit the work of other filmmakers and artists—and we will discuss the very nature of filmmaking itself.

Along the way I will share an occasional personal story, among them my twenty years living on a boat in Sausalito, California.

With good fortune, these words and pictures will provide a pathway to future films that I hope to make, and films that you the visitor will make and you as a viewer will watch with a careful and clear-eyed appreciation.

You are invited to participate, to send comments and offer suggestions about topics to cover and subjects dear to your hearts. All are welcome. No one is excluded.

And now the journey begins!

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