Deadly oasis

Ninety minutes before the premiere screening of Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis, producer Amie Williams is checking the picture, sound and saturation qualities of her film’s first few minutes. It’s a documentary, but the plot and the players are sheer drama in an Erin Brockovich-like exposé. It’s an awful truth: America’s largest confirmed cancer cluster is an hour’s drive from here. The film premiered last Friday at Red Hawk Golf Club at Wingfield Springs.

Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis does not seek to identify the mysterious source of the deadly leukemia that 16 Churchill County children have contracted since 1997. And while it might be tempting to portray the tension between Fallon residents and the government authorities from whom answers are demanded, instead Williams sensitively presents balanced insight into the story, focusing on the three children who lost their lives and the ones who live.

“I read about [the cluster] in a newspaper,” Williams explains. “I got drawn into this picture of [a child] and his dad, right after getting treatment, and I said, ‘Let’s just drive up there and see if we can meet the families.’ Everyone was so open and genuine. I feel like part of the community now. I’ve done four or five films, and it’s one of those films where I know I’m going to be in touch with these people for the rest of my life. The story is unfolding. I’m going to stay with it.”

It’s that unfolding, the unwritten chapters, that compels the filmmaker.

“The frustrating thing is there’s a beginning, middle and end to a film, and you have to finish it, at some point. Even now I’m feeling guilty that I didn’t hang in there for another three or four years, but I was under contract. Documentary, by nature, should be the long haul, and as it is, I worked on it for over two years. Before I got the [Independent Television Service] grant, I’d already filmed most of it.”

The California filmmaker grew up in a small Wisconsin community, where weekends on her grandmother’s farm established a tangible sense of place. Fast-forward to Yale University, where Williams pursued theater and acting but “found out really soon there’s a lot of rejection and not a lot of power.”

“Directors tell you what to do,” she says, “and I just didn’t take to it very well. But for my senior project, I decided to direct a play. I went to Africa after Yale, to study theater, drama and dance in Kenya, and then to film school at UCLA. As soon as I picked up a camera, I knew I wanted to be behind the camera, learn how to shoot, and that’s my strength. I shot this film, [and] most of this stuff myself. As an independent, you have to do it all.”

On location, a crew of two women made the movie: Williams, 40, and associate producer Stephanie Dove, 30, another film school grad who made treks to Fallon.

“It’s just me and Stephanie going there; Stephanie holding the boom and me shooting,” recalls Williams. “We had so little money, and kept getting discouraged, more and more rejections of grants, and we just kept going. It didn’t matter if no grants came in. Once we met the kids and the families, we just said, ‘We’re going to keep coming up here.’ It was hard. Seven-hour drives. Counting pennies for gas. A local history professor put us up in her house. Eating McDonald’s. It’s worth it if PBS will put it on the air.”

That date has yet to be determined, but the film’s impact is already enough to summon a crowd that included the families portrayed in the film, scientists and a cluster of men wearing suits and expressions of defensive skepticism. Throughout the screening, there was a montage of tears and laughter, anger and angst.

“There has to be an answer to this. There has to be,” Williams says. “More than ever, it’s critical that we focus on what kind of world we want for our kids. Don’t we want a safe environment? Don’t we want to raise them in a rural community, of all places? That’s the irony of Fallon.”

Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis has given a group known as Fallon Families In Search of Truth a tenacious voice. With a blend of elation and exhaustion, the producer-director emphasizes that nonfiction filmmaking is inherently powerful.

“The thing about documentary filmmaking that keeps me going back and back and back is the process of making the film, not the finished product. [It’s] interacting with these people, coming from outside with your opinions, meeting them face-to-face and putting a camera—shining a light, literally—in their living room while they’re eating dinner. … I was in the hospital when some of the kids were getting treated. You have to walk a fine line, and at the same time always respond to the subject matter.

“It must be like what people in the medical field feel when they see healing happening, or miracles. … I don’t really think my camera changed anyone’s life in Fallon, but it helped the families to articulate things they weren’t allowed to say in public. They’re such good, strong people.

“A nuclear bomb went off outside Fallon in the ‘60s; [there’s] uranium, pesticides, residue from the mining, arsenic. There’s got to be a way people can come together, challenge the situation and say, ‘We don’t need to live in a toxic environment.' "