Framer Framed

The Salton Sea in Southern California has a highly stressed ecosystem that’s been rapidly shrinking in recent years, shaped both by global climate change and by long-standing local environmental pressures. Yet its ecological crisis is only one part of the story. The area also served as a major site for US military atomic bomb testing and training during the final stages of the Second World War and throughout the Cold War.

The film traces these histories beginning in Wendover, Utah, where pilots trained for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Archival artefacts from this period – including models of Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs and the original ‘loading pit’ – an infrastructure that Marxt has examined in earlier works. This forms part of the background to the artists’ return to the region, informing their inquiry into how the Salton Sea became a testing ground for nuclear operations that shaped global geopolitics.

At the same time, Marxt and Smiljanić turn to the region’s contemporary social and ecological realities. Intensive monoculture agriculture dominates the surrounding landscape, and complex alliances have emerged between undocumented agricultural workers from Latin America and local Native American communities seeking to protect their territories. The filmmakers work closely with members of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians – survivors of a nineteenth-century genocide – who recall the medicinal plants and ecological knowledge once rooted around the Salton Sea before its degradation.

Bringing together testimonies, landscape studies, and critical reflections, AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB, or: Looking for reflections in the toxic field of plenty reveals how past violences continue to surface in the present. Beneath the salt bushes lie the radioactive remnants of Cold War nuclear testing – a muted ticking that hints at the return of tensions once thought buried.

The film has been shown at several international festivals, including DOK Leipzig, Kassel Dokfest, Viennale, and Ann Arbor Film Festival, where it won the Jury Award, and more. The presentation marks the film’s first screening in the Netherlands.

Still from AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB, or: Looking for reflections in the toxic field of plenty (2024). Courtesy of Lukas Marxt

The film is supported by Sonic Acts. Part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.