Update: Tri-City high school student’s documentary to premiere on the big screen
Update: More Tri-Cities showings scheduled
More screenings have been added for the documentary “Hanford,” made by Hanford High student Augustin Dulauroy.
Two more screening rooms were opened the day of the premiere at Fairchild Cinemas in Richland for the 320 people who showed up.
In the next two days it sold out with more screening shown every day.
It can still be seen in the Tri-Cities, with screenings set Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and evenings at the Southgate Fairchild Cinemas in Kennewick.
Tri-City high school student’s documentary to premiere on the big screen
A Tri-Cities filmmaker will have the premiere of his first feature-length documentary at Fairchild Cinemas in Richland later this month.
He is 17 and the president of the Hanford High Video Production Club.
Augustin Dulauroy has been making short videos with friends since middle school and had a short film he directed selected for the All American Film Festival in New York last fall.
But he wanted to try making a documentary after he worked as sound engineer and videographer for a documentary on the Le Mans sports car race in France. It was written and directed by his mother, Virginie Dulauroy.
“After a little thinking I realized that the perfect documentary topic was where I live,” Dulauroy said.
The result is the 52-minute documentary “Hanford,” billed as a story of success and failure.
During World War II, workers at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington raced to produce the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, helping to end the war.
But plutonium production then and through the Cold War at the nuclear reservation adjoining Richland came at a cost.
Settlers and Native Americans were forced from their land. Radiation sickened some people. And $2.5 billion is spent annually on environmental cleanup of the 580-square-mile site.
Stories of secrecy at the nuclear reservation drew Dulauroy into the Hanford story, he said.
He interviewed experts on Hanford like Robert Franklin, president of the B Reactor Museum Association and professor at Washington State University Tri-Cities, and health physicist Ron Kathren, the first professor emeritus for WSU Tri-Cities.
Dulauroy said he looked for untold stories about Hanford, or at least stories that are little known outside the Tri-Cities.
Tickets for the premiere at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 28 cost $5 and can be purchased in advance online from Fairchild Cinemas.
The documentary will be released on Amazon Prime Video USA on March 2 and on Vimeo-On-Demand Worldwide on March 3.
Dulauroy says he’d like a career as a filmmaker.
But knowing that is a tough field to break into, he plans to keep his options open when he graduates from Hanford High this spring. He’s also interested in science and history, he said.
This story was originally published February 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM.