ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE: A Film on the Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance

This is the second talk on ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE at UBC this month, and the first at Green College. Details for the earlier screening on October 5 in Allard School of Law can be found online.

As political pressure mounts in the US to meet net zero carbon goals, the nuclear power industry makes its case for a nuclear 'renaissance.' In place of the highly costly nuclear towers that have been shut down across many regions of the United States, in the 2010s investors began to promote small modular reactors (SMRs). ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE, a documentary by Janice Haaken currently in production, follows anti-nuclear activists and attorneys from the Columbia River region as they draw lessons from the decades-long fight to shut down the Trojan Nuclear Power plant in Oregon and reflect on current promotional campaigns for SMRs.

In this talk, Director Janice Haaken provides background on the project, an eight-minute 'sizzler' or work sample of the film, and discusses the role of collaborations with Indigenous and front-line communities in the making of ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE.

Janice (Jan) Haaken is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the inaugural John Grace Memorial Filmmaker in Residence at Green College. She received audience awards at major film festivals in 2019 for her previous documentary, Our Bodies Our Doctors. NECESSITY was selected by the Doc Society NYC as part of the 2019 Inaugural Climate Story Lab where Janice Haaken and co-director Samantha Praus joined the lab as fellows. Janice also taught visual methods in the social sciences and screened a number of her films as a Fulbright Scholar at University College Cork in Ireland in Winter term 2020.

Prior to NECESSITY Part I: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance and NECESSITY Part II: Climate Justice & The Thin Green Line, she directed six feature films, including Our Bodies Our Doctors (2019), Milk Men: The Life and Times of Dairy Farmers (2016), Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines (2014), Guilty Except for Insanity (2008), Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag (2006) and Diamonds, Guns and Rice (2005). Her films focus on social problems that stir public controversy and on stressful jobs performed in liminal spaces and on the social margins. From refugee camps, war zones, psychiatric hospitals and abortion clinics to dairy farms, drag bars and hip-hop clubs, Janice’s documentaries focus on people working in various border zones and their insights on the world around them. For more information on her films, go to www.jhaaken.com.

Janice has also published extensively in the areas of psychoanalysis and feminism, the history of psychiatric diagnosis, the psychology of storytelling, group responses to violence, the dynamics of social change and documentary methods. Her books include Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down (2021), Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling (2010) and Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back (2000).