To Use a Mountain – Films – Visions du Réel

Casey Carter
United States | 2025 | 99 min
World premiere
Language : English
Subtitles : French

Special Jury Award offered by Région de Nyon

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. Each candidate site was studied in detail by the Department of Energy’s scientists and bureaucrats, in a process met with distress and resistance. A compelling indictment that interweaves physics, geology and democracy.

In 1982, the United States, which possesses the greatest number of nuclear facilities in the world, began their search for a landfill site for their most dangerous waste. The Department for Energy at the time preselected six sites across the country.
Each of these areas was studied and documented in detail, and their residents consulted. The film, which adopts an observational yet sensitive tone, offers us a topography of these sites and their residents. In Texas, Utah, Mississippi, Nevada, the communities excavate memories of their confrontations with the administration, as well as the distress and outcry that these caused.
Through exchanges with his fellow citizens, turned into experts by their circumstances, the filmmaker begins his quest as a layperson, but then proceeds to take stock of a hijacked debate, urging us to take back control of the situation. His journey across America goes back in time, reminding us that these lands were originally stolen from their first occupants, as we rediscover the intimate links between nuclear, civil and military powers.
Katy Léna Ndiaye

To Use a Mountain, 2025
Two Boys and a Dream, 2023
Two Prisons, 2020
The Rights of Nature, 2019