THE FIRST SECRET CITY Screening at Schlafly Bottleworks April 7th

THE FIRST SECRET CITY screens Thursday April 7th at 7:00pm at Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Avenue Maplewood, MO 63143). The directors of the film will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.

Before the creation of the secret cities of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford, the Manhattan Project hired the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works of St. Louis to refine the first uranium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For the next two decades, Mallinckrodt continued its classified work for the Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War. The resulting radioactive waste contaminated numerous locations in the St. Louis area some of which have not been cleaned up 70 years after the end of World War II. Told through the eyes of an overexposed worker, the story expands through a series of interviews that careen down a toxic pathway leading to a fiery terminus at a smoldering, radioactively-contaminated landfill. THE FIRST SECRET CITY from filmmakers C.D. Stelzer and Alison Carrick is a feature-length documentary that reveals a forgotten history and its continuing impact on the community in the 21st Century, uncovering past wrongdoing and documenting the renewed struggles to confront the issue.

C.D. Stelzer is an award-winning investigative journalist. He first began reporting on nuclear waste in 1991 for the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’ alternative weekly newspaper. In 2010, he revealed how workers and residents at a former Dow Chemical plant in Venice, Ill. had been chronically exposed to Cold War-era radioactive contamination without their knowledge for decades. The stories appeared in FOCUS/midwest online. The documentary The First Secret City is the result of years of work in collaboration with filmmaker Alison Carrick.

Alison Carrick is a St. Louis-based, independent filmmaker and writer. Her previous work has been screened at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase (Close Up, 2011; The Waiting Hour, 2012) , and she has worked as a cinematographer on various local productions. This is her first feature-length documentary. Carrick has bachelor degrees in English and Anthropology from the University of Kansas and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

$6 suggested for the screening. A yummy variety of food from Schlafly’s kitchen is available as are plenty of pints of their famous home-brewed suds.

“Culture Shock” is the name of a film series here in St. Louis that is the cornerstone project of a social enterprise that is an ongoing source of support for Helping Kids Together(http://www.helpingkidstogether.com/) a St. Louis based social enterprise dedicated to building cultural diversity and social awareness among young people through the arts and active living.

The films featured for “Culture Shock” demonstrate an artistic representation of culture shock materialized through mixed genre and budgets spanning music, film and theater. Through ‘A Film Series’ working relationship with Schlafly Bottleworks, they seek to provide film lovers with an offbeat mix of dinner and a movie opportunities.