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WC to Host Film Director and Screening of ‘Day of the Western Sunrise’

Documentary Features Animation and Recollections of Surviving Crew The Japanese tuna trawler, Lucky Dragon No. 5, was on a fishing expedition in the Pacific Ocean in 1954 when its 23 crew members experienced what appeared to be a snow squall. The white stuff falling onto their vessel and into the sea turned out to be the radioactive ash from a nuclear explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima eight years earlier. Day of the Western Sunrise is an animated documentary featuring the event as depicted by three survivors. The film will be screened at Wilmington College April 22, at 7 p.m., in the McCoy Room of Kelly Center and also feature a talkback session with the director, Keith Reimink. The public event is co-sponsored by WC’s Peace Resource Center and Meriam R. Hare Quaker Heritage Center. The documentary, which premiered last fall in Pittsburgh, is designed to initiate dialogue. The nuclear test, known as Castle Bravo, was the largest testing of a nuclear device by the United States. The Soviet Union later conducted one even larger before those two nuclear powers and Great Britain signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Reimink started Daliborka Films, a Pittsburgh-based documentary film company focusing on “films with a purpose.” Day of the Western Sunrise is his second full-length endeavor. His first documentary was the award-winning No Horizon Anymore, which chronicled a year he spent living and working in Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.