Nuclear Family
a film by Erin & Travis Wilkerson
52nd Berlin International Film Festival Selection
February 10th - 20th, 2022
“In their essayistic tour de force NUCLEAR FAMILY, Erin and Travis Wilkerson investigate the use of atomic energy in the US for both peaceful and military means; they don’t just uncover many fenced-off areas in the desert, but also various answers to the question of how to make political cinema today.”
Arsenal, Institut für Film und Videokunst (Berlin, Germany)
An American family takes an apocalyptic road trip through the US West. A summer holiday of camping, mini golf, swimming, and baseball, in landscapes inscribed by extermination, genocide, and war. Tormented by images of nuclear war since childhood, the pair explores nuclear test facilities across America with their family in tow. The film re-examines recurring violence, nuclear and human history, overlapped with memories of the massacre of Native Americans.
“It's co-written and directed by my partner Travis Wilkerson and I, and it follows a family road trip we took in 2019 to visit nuclear missile silos of the American West. Landscapes we had spent much of our childhoods in. We did not intend the film to be our farewell to home, but that is what it became. We moved soon after the pandemic outbreak to Singapore, which only intensified this work as critique of settlement, and a brutal rupture of nostalgia.”
Erin Wilkerson (TT PhD 2021), co-founder of Creative Agitation, is dedicated to investigating waste-landscapes, invasive species, and borderlands, and is finishing a body of multimedia work on extraction landscapes. Her early professional work in architecture, focused on landscape restoration, specifically, the shift from the lawn - as a tool of land domination as an imposed English aesthetic taxing on already limited water supplies, on conquered land - to species, suited to the arid Los Angeles climate. This entailed the reintroduction and propagation of native species that thrive there, do not tax resources, and benefit their new land by improving soil quality and encouraging pollinators.
Her work expanded into investigations of nuclear missile infrastructures of the American West. She collected botanical samples from silos in Montana, for the documentary “Nuclear Family”, to track the extent of invasion on the grasslands and mountain ecosystems. The uncollectable specimen, Helianthus petiolaris, native prairie sunflowers, at the mouth of a nuclear missile silo, were mutated, like a melted Dali clock, next to a soybean field, has changed her practice indefinitely. The documentation of invasive must also include the intended eradication of the indigenous.