Docutah Presents Award-Winning Downwinder Documentary

This powerful, award-winning feature-length documentary, Bound by the Wind, investigates the global human impact of nuclear weapons testing and documents the 75-year international campaign to achieve a comprehensive nuclear test ban. It screens as one of the monthly screenings of DOCUTAH at Dunford Auditorium in the Browning Learning Resource Center at Utah Tech University at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26. Admission is free to students and the public. The documentary focuses principally on the plight of the world's "downwinders," those who have been adversely affected by radiation from nuclear weapons testing. Three of the downwinders in the film are St. George residents. The two who are still alive are Claudia Peterson and Janet Gordon. The deceased downwinder from St. George is Elmer Pickett. Ms. Peterson will join three-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, David L. Brown, in a panel discussion with distinguished members of the Utah Tech faculty after the screening. 

The film portrays the enormous human costs of the Cold War nuclear arms race and reveals the secrecy, negligence, and deceit that characterized the nuclear testing programs of both the United States and the former Soviet Union. It is structured around the dramatic stories of several downwinders - from Utah, the Marshall Islands and Kazakhstan near the principal Soviet nuclear test site - who have become passionate activists in the global movement to achieve a comprehensive nuclear test ban. The film interweaves their stories of fallout, nuclear radiation, birth defects, cancer and official deceit with archival footage of key historical events and analysis by activists, scientific experts, and government officials.

Bound by the Wind captures the momentum generated in the late 1980s and 1990s by the worldwide movement to achieve a nuclear test ban and shows the dismal legacy of health and environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons testing in the U.S., the former Soviet Union and the Marshall Islands. It also explores the link to nuclear weapons proliferation, one of the most timely and urgent aspects of the nuclear testing debate.

"This is far and away the best film on the nuclear legacy. The use of historical clips and survivor interviews is nothing short of brilliant. David Brown has a journalist's clear mind, an artist's feel, and a historian's sense of the significance of events."

- Stan Grossfeld, The Boston Globe