Young Filmmaker Accepted into Santa Fe Film Festival
Released on = November 11, 2006, 9:53 am
Press Release Author = Jordan McKittrick
Industry = Media
Press Release Summary = On Aug. 6, 1945, 140,000 people were vaporized by an atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima. Three days later another 70,000 were killed in Nagasaki. McKittrick\'s film tells the story of two survivors.
Press Release Body = --For Immediate Release—
Nov. 11, 2006---Sometimes good things do come in small packages.
Jordan McKittrick is a 15-year-old high school student in Santa Fe, N.M. His passion is filmmaking and his first film, Help, if I may ask will appear at the Santa Fe Film Festival on Dec. 7 at 1:15 p.m. and Dec. 9 at 2:15 p.m. at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in downtown Santa Fe.
Inspired by two atomic bomb survivors and their visit to the birthplace of the bomb, Los Alamos, N.M., in 2005, Jordan decided to do his 23 minute film.
“The anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima was a wake up call for all of us who were in Los Alamos 60 years to the day after it happened on Aug. 6, 2005,” Jordan said.
Masako Hashida was 15-years-old in 1945 when the bomb was dropped on her city. In peacetime she would have gone to school. But like all her friends at that time in history, she was drafted to work at the Mitsubishi weapons factory in Nagasaki. Her job was making torpedoes.
The second atomic bomb to be used on a human population was dropped on Nagasaki while Hashida was working at that factory, located less than one mile from the blast.
Ueda Koji was 3˝-years-old when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He was sitting on the porch listening to his grandmother read him a story when he was jolted by a sudden flash of light and a tremendous roar.
His mother’s accounts are what he remembers most. At times she talked about what she saw. For Koji, the stories were ghostly.
“The survivors weren’t angry,” Jordan said. “That’s the thing that stood out most for me about filming them.”
They joined New Mexicans for a disarmament gathering and pleaded for a world free of nuclear weapons.
Events of the day were tied to similar ones in Japan, California, Nevada, Texas, Tennessee, Colorado and elsewhere around the world.
Jordan attends The Academy for Technology and the Classics and Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, N.M.
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