WENDELL — Think of the pair of locally produced documentaries that will be screened over two nights in Town Hall, Friday and Monday, as bookends in the history of the anti-nuclear movement, locally and nationally.
“Power Struggle,” Wendell filmmaker Robbie Leppzer’s documentary about the campaign to shut down the Vermont Yankee Nuclear power plant, will be screened Friday at Wendell Town Hall at 7 p.m. as a “sneak preview” fundraising event as it heads to film festivals.
The Wendell showing, to be preceded by a 6 p.m. potluck dinner, will also include an appearance by longtime anti-nuclear activist and author Harvey Wasserman, who was among those living at the Montague farm commune in the early 1970s and who was part of the birth of the nation’s anti-nuclear movement.
In addition to his role as guest speaker Friday, Wasserman is scheduled to return as part of a panel discussion Monday in Wendell Town Hall, immediately following the screening of “Seabrook 40 Years Later: Lessons for Today’s Activism,” Leppzer’s documentary about the protests at the New Hampshire nuclear plant site — referred to by the then-18-year-old filmmaker in his first documentary as “a seminal protest of 1970s environmental activism.”
“This film beautifully celebrates a great victory for citizen action, for citizen activism, and for the power of non-violence,” Wasserman said. “The shutdown of Vermont Yankee, which is attributable to citizen action, fits a global pattern in that this 20th century technology has now run its course. There are only four reactors under construction today,” with 99 operating reactors — drastically few than the 1,000 that Richard Nixon in the early 1970s predicted would be built by the turn of the century.
Friday’s screening of “Power Struggle” — which chronicles conflicts over the Vernon, Vt. reactor’s relicensing and 2014 shutdown — is in anticipation of the film’s “world premiere” showing at the Provincetown Film Festival in mid-June.
On the Web: www.turningtide.com
www.powerstrugglemovie.com