A scene from Lucy Walker's Countdown to Zero. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

At Sundance this year, director Lucy Walker was one of few filmmakers present with two feature films being screened. The first was Waste Land, a collaboration with the artist Vik Muniz on a recycling project with the inhabitants of the world’s largest garbage dump ‘Jardim Gramacho’, just outside Rio. The film is an inspiring depiction of trash-pickers who recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage and through the process, begin to re-imagine their lives.

Her second film though, Countdown to Zero, is very different but just as powerful and enlightening, on the subject of a global nuclear arms crisis. The film was produced by Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth), and Walker was given the go ahead to create a film without any particular mandate.  At the film’s screening in Sundance she said that while researching the project and speaking to experts on the actual realities of nuclear proliferation, she was shaken out of her own complacency and forced to reeducate herself.

Director Lucy Walker, photo by Hugo Tillmans

In an interview in Filmmaker magazine, Walker says, “…You know it’s possible, but you don’t think those possibilities could add up to an actuality, and unfortunately every single person I spoke to said, no, it’s real. I looked for reassurance, I really looked for a solution [to the problem] that a nuclear catastrophe is a matter of when, not if. I didn’t want to have to draw that conclusion. Yet nobody could give me a sensible counterargument. And nobody could tell me that the steps needed to be taken to blow up New York City not only could happen but had already happened. That was really shocking to me. You want to think nuclear weapons secrets aren’t smugglable, you want to think uranium isn’t enrichable very easily. You want to think no stuff actually gets loose. Who would have thought kitty litter was more radioactively detectable than fissile material? Isn’t that insane?”

View Down onto Irma's Portrait on the Floor- Photo Vik Muniz, courstesy of Vik Muniz studio

Both of director Lucy Walker’s films will be showing in New York City in the coming weeks.

For further details:
Countdown to Zero: http://www.takepart.com/zero
Wasteland: Docuweeks Screenings @ IFC Centre NYC. USA. August 13th – August 19th

By Kiša Lala