Conscript: Atomic Tests Drama Bolstering Truth with Fiction

Daniel Everitt-Lock’s Conscript is a 13-minute drama about the night before a young man leaves for his conscription and is doomed. With the ghost of nuclear war embedded into his family, Alex’s last evening at home becomes a little break in time that is like nothing before or after that day. 

The draft brings old traumas to the surface as Alex’s (Adam Fox) parents (Tim Rozon, Lora Burke) fight about what they want to but cannot control. It reduces Alex into a little boy trying to carry on as though nothing is wrong, and subsequently an adolescent when he is forced to intervene in the escalating clash, until finally, he confronts them as an adult with his mind made up. The threeway conflict comes to two once again, but this time it is Alex and his father. As buried memories come up, Alex’s resolve is put to the test. 

Though it might sound like an ode to bravery and duty, and in a way it is, the film is more importantly about the fundamental tragedy of being dutiful to a treacherous being. To this end, it uses fiction and non-fiction together. Combining a dramatised letter from the grave with filmed interviews (from Everitt-Lock’s documentary Our Planet, The People, My Blood) of surviving veteran soldiers of US nuclear testing, the film attempts to remember the trivial matter of just soldiers’ lives in the grand scheme of nuclear things. It does this best, in fact, whenever it shifts into the many cutaways to 4:3 black and white shots (Fox is a great face for these) that evade strict plot and enter the realm of experience. The past and the future collapse into a unitary sense of the delicate haze of memory here while Alex’s father is still recounting his memory of the atomic bomb. As for the mid-credits interviews, they are compelling in and of themselves, bringing flesh and blood truth to the lines already played out in the plot. 

Conscript exists to remind its viewers of their bloodied history as well as the fraught present in a global landscape once again ravaged by war. The sacrificial lambs walk on in their dutiful lines. 

Watch Conscript Short Film Trailer