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Casey Carter makes his feature directing debut with the award-winning documentary To Use A Mountain. The film is currently playing in New York (Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film). Check out our full interview with the filmmaker, as well as Eric Holmes’ glowing review of the documentary, below!
Read more: Casey Carter Explores “Human Dimension” With ‘To Use A Mountain’ Documentary
The Origins of ‘To Use A Mountain’
In 1982, six rural communities in the United States were notified that the government’s nuclear waste might be buried beneath them as a way of isolating the waste for 10,000 years. The Department of Energy created the assessments, thus affecting the lives of said communities. Ultimately Yucca Mountain in Nevada was chosen as the nuclear waste site. But after decades of controversy, construction in the area was stopped. The affected lives and communities difference are spotlighted in To Use A Mountain.
“Part of what I wanted to do in the film was to discover that human dimension and create a film that is in a way a rebuttal to the form of this archive of describing a place in a purely analytical and utilitarian way,” said Casey Carter. “And present these places in a more humanistic way. To see the communities (and) the landscape, to feel what it feels like in these places. But also to feel what it feels like to face the possibility that the federal government will say, ‘You’re the one. This is where we wanna put this place.’ To face this potential destiny that people in these communities felt as an existential threat to their history, to their communities, and to their identities in some sense.”
‘To Use A Mountain’ Is A Mixture of Archival And Personal Accounts
Carter crafts a “visual voice” for the maps and texts that comes from the Department of Energy. This stylistic choice creates a “psychological space” that captures the feeling of “what does it feel to be mapped?”
“And then there’s just the topic of the film,” added Carter. It’s heavy and we’re talking about people whose families were impacted by nucelear weapons testing in Southern Nevada. There’s no easy away around what that looks like and feels like. It’s tragic.”
Check out Eric Holmes’ full interview with Casey Carter. Holmes reviews To Use A Mountain on this week’s CinemAddicts:
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