“If this fails, I’ve failed all these people.”

Alison Carrick, Washington University special collections assistant and independent filmmaker, is discussing her most recent work, “The First Secret City,” which she co-directed with investigative journalist C.D. Stelzer. The film, which played at the Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival on Sunday, examines the consequences of the U.S. government’s decision to enlist the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works of St. Louis to refine uranium—which would later be used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—during World War II. The process produced radioactive waste, traces of which have remained in the St. Louis area ever since.

Courtesy of Alison Carrick

The people Carrick refers to are residents of Bridgeton, who live in close proximity to West Lake landfill, which houses radioactive waste, and the Bridgeton landfill, home to an underground fire that may reach the radioactive material in three to six months. She and Stelzer spent nearly four years compiling interviews and filming meetings of concerned citizens, hoping to shed light on an issue that, even with previous media coverage, has evaded national, and even local, attention.

Born in England, Carrick moved to St. Louis at the age of 10. She studied English and anthropology at the University of Kansas, and while she took film classes as an undergraduate, the filmmaking process seemed daunting, given the prohibitive costs of film and cameras. She turned to writing, which, to her, “seemed [like] more of a practical way to be creative,” and completed an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Missouri—St. Louis.

By the middle of the last decade, Carrick realized that, due to modern camera technology, filmmaking was now accessible to non-professionals. She began to build a portfolio of fiction and documentary shorts, using local contests as a means of developing her craft. She appreciated the discipline the contests required.

“It gave you a deadline,” she said, “It was sort of like someone saying, ‘Here’s a project, an idea. Go ahead and try to produce something that’s a few minutes long.’”

Not even the contests could prepare her for “The First Secret City,” which is her first feature-length project.

“Going in, I didn’t realize the scope of it, to be honest,” she said. “It was a lot more than I bargained for.”

Carrick joined the project in 2012, two years after Stelzer’s initial attempt at telling this story. After Stelzer and his first collaborator split due to creative differences, Carrick, who was friends with Stelzer before the production, offered her services. While Carrick was excited at the prospect of helping a friend and expanding her filmography, she didn’t anticipate the film’s sprawling nature.

“Originally, I thought that we could just go and re-shoot some of the stuff that [Stelzer] had already shot…but then it ended up being a lot more than that, because we did all the re-shoots, and then the story got bigger and bigger,” she said.

Her and Stelzer’s efforts to wrangle an increasingly complex story into a single film led to tensions between the two. Stelzer, who primarily handled the interviews, became frustrated with Carrick, who was responsible for cinematography and editing, in post-production as she struggled to cut interviews from the film.

“I think towards the end, he maybe became frustrated with me [for] not making decisions about what to leave in and leave out,” Carrick said, though she added that these difficulties did not disrupt the two’s shared vision. “In general, we were both on the same page about the direction of the story.”

The two faced external pressures as well. While taking photographs of the Mallinckrodt Chemical plant, they were approached by one of the plant’s security guards, who recorded Stelzer’s license plate number and reported it to the Department of Homeland Security, which sent FBI agents to Stelzer’s home. While Carrick was able to avoid such an encounter, the visit put her and Stelzer on edge.

“It definitely shook us up,” she said, “but we weren’t going to stop doing the film.”

For Carrick, this sense of purpose arose from her gradual understanding of the human costs of the leftover radioactive material. This realization increased the pressure she felt to do justice to the stories of those affected by it.

“Midway through [making the film], I began to see just what an impact this issue has on people’s lives, like all the huge responsibilities to at least make it not bad.”

She originally sought to tell these stories in an unconventional style, inspired by the likes of Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell,” which interrogates the director’s family history by using both interviews and fictional recreations made to look like home movies.

But the further Carrick dove into her story, the more she realized a clear narrative structure would be the best way to do justice to an issue with potentially devastating consequences.

While she and Stelzer worked without scripts, they decided on using geography to organize he film, moving among the local sites affected by the radioactive waste. Though not what Carrick originally envisioned, she realized it suited the story best.

“If you told me we were gonna do that in the beginning, I’d say that’s too boring,” she said, “but in the end, it became kind of necessary just to make it understandable to people. So I kind of sacrificed what I had maybe wanted to do so that people could follow the story, because that’s the most important thing, in the end.”

Still, Carrick was able to merge her original and revised intentions by withholding information. Rather than make the audience sit through long spells of voice-over narration, Carrick avoided the device altogether, piecing the story together through individual experiences.

“I tried to let personal moments come through,” she said. “I felt this issue is very difficult to look at and think about, and so for me, we have to have those human moments; we have to have the emotional moments. Because otherwise, you’re just watching something that’s so depressing—nobody’s gonna want to watch it.”

Stelzer hopes the human element can bring much-needed attention to an issue that has suffered from a diffusion of responsibility. The Environmental Protection Agency is currently responsible for cleaning the West Lake landfill, but the agency rarely handles radioactive waste. Adding to the confusion, the Department of Energy has been tasked with footing the bill, while Missouri attorney general Chris Koster is suing Republic Services, which owns Bridgeton landfill, for mishandling the underground fire that has brought the landfills national attention in recent months.

This bureaucratic tangle has led to inaction—Koster’s lawsuit will not come to trial until March, at which point, the fire may have already come into contact with the radioactive waste. Carrick blames an age-old culprit: human denial.

“I think the denial issue is what we kept coming back to,” she said. “It’s human nature; it’s not that anyone’s not intelligent—no blame to be pointed—but if you are in a state of denial, you are not able to solve your problem.”

With the film, Carrick and Stelzer are giving a voice to those threatened by the radioactive waste and arguing for immediate action.

“We’re hoping with this film that we can at least just say, ‘Look, this is the problem; we maybe don’t know exactly what the solution is, but we know whatever we’re doing now isn’t working. So let’s try something else.’ Because this is crazy.”