At 8:00am on a Saturday in January of 2018, everyone on the Hawaiian islands received a statewide alert warning of an immanent nuclear missile. With President Trump and Kim Jong-un in the middle of a dangerous escalation, many people prepared for their homes and families to be destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse. 38 minutes later, everyone received a second alert that it was an error. False Alarm follows the stories of seven different individuals’ diverse reactions and reflections on those 38 minutes. 38 minutes which open a window into the hope of resistance and tragedy of acceptance of militarism, colonialism, and nuclear weapons.
Film Details
Runtime: 51 mins
Format: HD
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Distribution Format: DCP, Digital Purchase Online (coming soon), Streaming (coming soon)
Creative Personnel
Nick Lyell
Direction, Production, Editing
A creative multimedia storyteller currently based in Oakland, CA whose work often explores power relationships, utopian realism, and moral inclusion, seeking to find the ways in which our relationships, language, and the stories we tell ourselves can limit or expand the scope of political possibility. Nick has directed, produced, and edited several award-winning fiction and non-fiction short films including Sirius Lee, The Zeke Sanders Story, E: The Film. His video work has been used in political TV advertisements and for major nationwide US advocacy campaigns. His non-video work has also been featured in art galleries in New York and Madison, WI.
Grace Harvey
Art Direction, Story Consulting
A musician and graphic designer based out of Oakland, CA. She has dipped her toes into a host of different styles of filmmaking: documentary, dance film, music videos, improvisational projection, and cameraless film. Currently, her practice is most centered around making beats and looping cello, bass, and vocals. With her music, she seeks to explore the past, how we got to here, and dream about the future, how can we get where we’re going.
Max Puchalsky
Score Composition, Story Consulting
Max Puchalsky is an artist and cultural worker involved in a range of projects that reflect his interest in collaboration and engagement with local community issues. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and teaches at Arts + Literature Laboratory and the Bayview International Center for Education And The Arts. Max is Creative Director of Midwest Story Lab and a member of the arts collective Solarpunk Surf Club. He was born at 354.39 ppm on the isthmus called Madison.
Director’s Statement
I came to Hawaii from Washington, DC, the seat of American political and military decision-making to ask people about a 38-minute near-death experience—a potential nuclear apocalypse—and how it made them reflect on the militarization of daily life.
What lessons does someone learn? How did people go forward with their life? How did people take that kind of shared trauma and diffuse it, push it aside, or use it to fuel change? These were the questions that inspired me to go to Hawaii and interview people about their perspectives. What I learned when I got there took me in some surprising directions.
As I spoke to people about their experiences, I began to see the connections brought to the fore by this unique incident on this unique island — the center of military surveillance and strategy for half the globe, facing climate change’s first impacts, illegally occupied by the US against the indigenous Kanaka Maoli.
Taking inspiration from films like Casting JonBenet and Hypernormalisation, False Alarm makes these connections for the audience, taking an incisive view beyond the surface level of narrative events that took place, into layers of subtext, doubt, ambiguity, and contradiction though a combination of interviews, archival footage, and quotidian video segments.
Stylistically, the film is fast moving, urgent, and fresh as often as it is somber and thoughtful. From the first moments of the film I set out to weave together past, present, and future for a mainland US audience — about the connections that I found, and the wisdom that might come from such diverse perspectives on this harrowing experience.