ON THE MORNING YOU WAKE (TO THE END OF THE WORLD): A VR EXPERIENCE
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A Refocus Film Festival Selection Presented in Partnership with Stanley Center for Peace and Security
At 8:08 on the morning of Saturday, January 13, 2018 - at the height of President Trump and Kim Jong Un’s threats to use nuclear weapons against one another - the people of Hawaii were faced with the unimaginable when cell phone alerts went off simultaneously across the islands with the entire state population receiving the following message from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HEMA):
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
As cellular communication networks collapsed, and panic took hold, 1.4m people had to contemplate the very real possibility that they were about to become victims of a nuclear attack.
In the minutes that followed, the people of Hawaii were forced to confront a myriad of existential questions that had been unthinkable just moments before. By the time HEMA finally managed to retract the incorrect warning message some 38 minutes later, it was too late to pretend that normality would simply resume. For decades the citizens of Hawai’i had - like all of us - been told that nuclear weapons were the only reliable guarantor of global peace. In less than an hour, their extraordinary collective experience had laid bare the ever-present, and growing, threat that nuclear weapons pose to the world. In the words of Kauai resident and nuclear campaigner Cynthia Lazaroff, "Nothing happened, but everything changed."
Based on the documentary audio testimony of those who witnessed these events firsthand, the spoken words of acclaimed poet Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, and set against an extraordinary immersive score from Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak), the is new work is an audio-driven VR experience that reveals and dramatizes the fundamental injustice of a world held hostage by nuclear weapons.
Official Selections: Sundance Film Festival 2022, South by Southwest 2022