Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis

Death in Nevada: Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis documents a real-life tragedy

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Filmmaker Amie Williams was sitting at the Coffee Pub on West Sahara when she first read about the mysterious concentration of childhood cancers in Fallon, Nev. "There was this picture in the Review-Journal of a father holding his little boy after a chemotherapy treatment," she explains, "and I thought, what if this happened to my son? My husband, Glen, read the piece and said, `This is your next film.'"

Two years and countless seven-hour drives later, Williams and associate producer Stephanie Dove completed Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis, a film that documents a community in crisis. Situated 60 miles east of Reno, Fallon is indeed an oasis, a small ranching town nestled among so many verdant alfalfa fields that the high school football team is called the Green Wave. But since 1999, 16 children have been diagnosed with acute-lymphocytic leukemia--in a town with a population of only 8,000. "We just started calling families," says Williams. "Everyone wanted to talk."

Focusing primarily on three local families, the film follows children through brutal regimens of chemotherapy and spinal taps while distraught parents deal with a wall of scientific and government bureaucracy. Breaking a 20-year moratorium on cluster studies, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control arrive to scrape dirt from the families' yards and collect samples of their water. A smiling Hillary Clinton appears, promising money, and is photographed with children whose happy faces are bloated by harsh medical treatments. Overhead, jets from the nearby naval air base whine constantly and slice the sky into a brilliant blue patchwork.

Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis is an intensely human story that's less about disease than the strength and determination of a community whose members have learned to rely only on each other. These are people who believe in solidarity, in PTA meetings, in the word of their mayor and the reliability of the family doctor. They are reluctant to blame. Recently, Brenda Gross--whose son, Dustin, caught Williams' eye in the R-J and whose family features prominently in the film--accompanied Williams to Washington, D.C., for a special screening of the film on Capitol Hill. A warm, articulate woman, Gross shows little sign of the emotional and physical strain her family has suffered. "We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society do we want to leave for our kids?" she says. "We have to keep pushing for answers."

"Environmental health isn't exactly a sexy topic," says Williams, who had to do much of the film's promotion on her own. Now based in California, Williams--along with local arts activist Joshua Abbey--was one of the co-founders of the CineVegas Film Festival (for which this reviewer also worked, in 1999 and 2000, as a programmer). She is best known in the valley for her documentaries One Day Longer: The Story of the Frontier Strike (which played CineVegas in December 1999) and Stripped and Teased: Tales from Las Vegas Women. Like the latter film (the closing-night offering in 1998's inaugural CineVegas), Fallon, NV feels like a work-in-progress. Like the best examples of investigative journalism, its author started out with neither an agenda nor pre-formed conclusions. So as each potential culprit comes to light, from pesticide runoff to nuclear testing to jet fuel leaks, the film disdains witch-hunting and paranoia in favor of a simple portrait of a cataclysmic--and ongoing--event.

"I had no conspiracy theory, and I wasn't interested in blasting the Navy," says Williams, who was born on a Navy base. "That's just too easy, too one-dimensional, and I have too much respect for people in the services." Instead, she aims to cast a balanced eye on a tragically unbalanced situation. "I wanted the children to tell the story," says Williams. And that's exactly what they do.