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Production
2023

To Use a Mountain

IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Grantee

  • black and white headshot of Casey Carter
    Casey Carter, Director
  • headshot of producer Colleen Cassingham wearing a blue jean shirt
    Colleen Cassingham, Producer
A transparent map of southern Nevada overlays an image of a desert ridge, partly covered in vegetation, partly barren. The foreground of the image is filled with motion blurred bushes, as captured from a moving vehicle. The map shows the outline of the Nevada Test Site, nested within the boundaries of the Nellis Airforce Base, northwest of Las Vegas. Three concentric circles delineate 100 mile intervals emanating from the Test Site. Map caption “community monitoring stations around the Nevada Test Site.”

About the Project

Physics, geology, and democracy collide across the expansive American interior, in a series of vignettes from six candidate sites for a sacrificial nuclear dumping ground.

Project Team

    black and white headshot of Casey Carter

    Casey Carter

    Casey Carter is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary designer whose work engages nonfiction storytelling in film, photography, data visualization, and cartography. Working through a mixture of portraiture, landscape, and evidentiary documents and media, his work centers on themes of governmentality, geography, and environmentalism. He was a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Film/Video Artist Fellow, a 2019 Points North Fellow, and a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow. His work as project director for Maya Lin’s What Is Missing? Foundation, won the 2023 Webby Awards for Best Activism Website as well as Best Navigation/Structure for desktop and mobile websites. His interdisciplinary background (BS in Physics, BS in Photography, M.Arch, M.S. in Design Health) informs his work across media, art, and design.

    headshot of producer Colleen Cassingham wearing a blue jean shirt

    Colleen Cassingham

    Colleen Cassingham (Producer) is a producer at Multitude Films focused on politically committed artful nonfiction that pushes formal boundaries. She is currently producing Reid Davenport’s second feature, Life After, about how disabled folks continue to die under the guise of assisted suicide, as well as a short series called Queer Futures, in association with Chicken & Egg Pictures. Her credits as Associate Producer include Pray Away (Tribeca 2020), Through Our Eyes: Apart (Provincetown 2020), Call Center Blues (SXSW 2020), Always in Season, which won the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, The Feeling of Being Watched (Tribeca 2018), and Love the Sinner (Tribeca 2017), which have been distributed by Netflix, Topic, HBOMax, POV, and Independent Lens. Colleen’s directorial debut short, From Damascus to Chicago, was broadcast on POV in 2017 and was an Editor’s Pick at The Atlantic. She was a 2021 Video Consortium mentor, a 2019 Points North Fellow, a 2017-2018 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio fellow, and a 2023 Sundance Producer Lab fellow.