Indian audiences see films on Australian Aborigines and uranium mining
The story of the aborigines’ struggle against uranium mining is told in Dirt Cheap: 30 Years On, an updated version of the 1980 Dirt Cheap, which reported how uranium mining was imposed on the aborigines of Kakadu in northern Australia, as the government subverted the will of the traditional owners of the land by buying off the body that was supposed to protect their rights to the land.
in Dirt Cheap. After the council votes to say no to uranium mining in their lands, the government strong-arms the council to sign away their rights, as the heartbroken president watches from his car.
Uranium Film Festival: Capturing Fallout Tehelka Blog, 17 Jan 13 “….. the fear that Madsen taps into in this film is that of communicating to future civilisations that the contents of this cavern they would find are very toxic.“What if a future generation thinks there’s something nice in that hole?” asks Norbert Sucharek, a German environmental journalist working in Brazil, who is the director of the Travelling International Uranium Film Festival, at whose Delhi leg the film was shown. “You could put up a sign, but what if there’s someone who says, ‘It’s all lies. There’s gold buried in there.’? The best way is to keep the knowledge about radioactivity alive. To save future generations, we should not forget it.
The ancient societies, such as the aboriginals in Australia, they have their legends which say ‘do not touch this stone. A rainbow snake lives here, and if you touch it, it will destroy the world.’ That was a way of transporting information to future generations that something is wrong there; we should not touch it.”
The story of the aborigines’ struggle against uranium mining is told in Dirt Cheap: 30 Years On, an updated version of the 1980 Dirt Cheap, which reported how uranium mining was imposed on the aborigines of Kakadu in northern Australia, as the government subverted the will of the traditional owners of the land by buying off the body that was supposed to protect their rights to the land.
In the 2011 film, the aborigines express their dismay at the Fukushima disaster, tinged with guilt at the fact that the uranium causing the radiation was mined in the lands they failed to defend against the Europeans. ….
the most heart-wrenching stories from the festival, as is sadly true of much else in the world, come from the process of extracting resources from the ground. “The traditional owners will always be pushed by the Europeans. We should get used to it,” says the president of the Northern Land Council, the body created to protect aboriginal land rights, in Dirt Cheap. After the council votes to say no to uranium mining in their lands, the government strong-arms the council to sign away their rights, as the heartbroken president watches from his car.
There is the story of the Cly clan, Navajos who were featured in countless documentaries, films and photographs, before exposure at the nearby uranium mine where they worked tore the family apart, which is shown in Return of Navajo Boy….. http://blog.tehelka.com/uranium-film-festival-capturing-fallout/
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