To Use a Mountain - Director Casey Carter

In 1982, six rural communities across the United States were notified that all of the nation’s nuclear waste might be buried beneath them forever. Faced with a mandate to isolate the waste for 10,000 years, the Department of Energy mapped, analyzed, and assembled its assessments, while the unsuspecting stewards of sacrificial territory found themselves fighting for their homes, health, history and dignity. Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, TO USE A MOUNTAIN assembles a people’s history of resistance and stewardship through a visceral journey across the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites. Farmers, miners, citizen scientists, Native American leaders, and activists—each with a story bound to this enduring threat—stand in stark contrast to the cold, silent machinery of bureaucracy, in a meditation on resistance, memory, and the timeless struggle between power and place.

About the filmmaker - Casey Carter is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary designer whose work engages nonfiction storytelling in film and video, photography, data visualization, and cartography. His work centers on themes of governmentality, geography, environmentalism, and personal subjectivities. His short films, TWO BOYS AND A DREAM (2023), TWO PRISONS (2020), and THE RIGHTS OF NATURE (2019), have screened at festivals including Revolutions Per Minute, SF Shorts, Salem, Ashland Independent, and Hong Kong Film Art. He holds a B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Photography from Middle Tennessee State University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan. His work has been supported through grants and fellowships from institutions including Sundance Documentary Film Program, IDA, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Marble House Project, Monson Arts, The Redford Center, SFFILM, Flies Collective, and others. He is the director, cinematographer, and editor of his first feature film, TO USE A MOUNTAIN, which premiered at the prestigious Visions du Réel, where it won a Special Jury Award, and has gone on to collect accolades at film festivals across the globe.