Richland

Developed as a temporary housing project for the workers of the Manhattan Project—which produced the weapons-grade plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped by the US government on the population of Nagasaki, Japan—Richland, Washington, officially became a city in the 1950s, growing along with the scope of the Cold War arms race. Through interviews with its inhabitants, mid-century archival film, and readings of the works of a local poet, Irene Lusztig’s portrait of the place contrasts its uncannily idyllic surface with the murderous history and lies on which it was built. This is a trenchant accounting of the human and environmental price paid for a “good life.”