2025 | USA | 99’

Six rural American communities are marked as candidates for an unthinkable fate: their land, a burial ground for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, a people’s history of resistance and stewardship emerges through a visceral journey across the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites.

A legal and environmental crisis unfolds across the expansive American interior, in a visceral journey through the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites for a sacrificial nuclear dumping ground.

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. It was an unimaginable transgression - and for some, insult to injury centuries in the making. In the end, one site was chosen: a desert ridge in Nevada called Yucca Mountain, on the unceded lands of the Western Shoshone. After decades of grassroots resistance and national political controversy, the development of the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain was halted. 

Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, To Use a Mountain assembles a people’s history of resistance and stewardship. Communities and individuals in the vicinity of the candidate sites 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.

film still: protestors standing at the entry to the Nevada National Security Site, formerly Nevada Test Site.