Casey Carter has built a body of work that refuses to separate aesthetics from accountability. A filmmaker and interdisciplinary designer, Carter moves fluidly between nonfiction film and video, photography, data visualization, and cartography—tools that, in his hands, become ways of mapping power as much as place. Across his practice, he returns to themes of governmentality, geography, environmentalism, and personal subjectivities, asking what it means to live inside systems that measure, categorize, and decide whose land—and whose lives—are expendable.
.
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, helping establish Carter as a precise and patient storyteller with a deep interest in the politics of landscape. With a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Photography from Middle Tennessee State University, plus a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan, his background reads like a blueprint for the kind of work he makes: rigorous, spatial, and unafraid of complexity..
Carter’s first feature film, To Use a Mountain, opens theatrically on August 21, arriving with the weight of significant international recognition already behind it. The film premiered at Visions du Réel in Switzerland, where it won a Special Jury Award in the international competition—its world premiere immediately signaling its urgency and craft. Since then, the film has continued to resonate across the festival circuit, screening in the Documentary Feature Competition at the Dallas International Film Festival, earning a Best Feature Honorable Mention at Doxa in Vancouver (ParaDoxa Forum), appearing at IDFA in Amsterdam as part of Best of Fest, and landing as an official selection at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula.
.
At its core, To Use a Mountain is a people’s history—one that traces the long shadow of America’s nuclear legacy through the lives of those forced to confront it up close. The film begins in 1982, when six rural communities across the United States were notified that the nation’s nuclear waste might be buried beneath them forever. Tasked with isolating the waste for 10,000 years, the Department of Energy mapped, analyzed, and assembled its assessments, while the residents of these proposed sites—suddenly recast as stewards of sacrificial territory—fought for their homes, health, history, and dignity.
Eventually, one site was chosen: Yucca Mountain, a desert ridge in Nevada on the unceded lands of the Western Shoshone. After decades of controversy, construction was halted, and still, no permanent solution has been devised for America’s 90,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.
Carter’s film moves against the impassive logic of government archives, assembling resistance and stewardship into something visceral and alive. Farmers, miners, citizen scientists, Native American leaders, and activists come into focus—not as footnotes to policy, but as the human center of a story about power, memory, and place. In an era shaped by escalating energy demands—now intensified by the ai data center boom and the next generation of nuclear projects it has helped justify—To Use a Mountain feels less like a historical account and more like a warning delivered in real time.
.
With its theatrical release, Carter’s debut feature invites a wider audience into a question that has been deferred for decades: who pays the price for the nation’s “solutions,” and what does it mean to call a landscape disposable?
.
Image: Peace activists standing at the entry to the Nevada National Security Site_ To Use a Mountain (Credit_ To Use a Mountain, LLC ) courtesy of EG PR
(Visited 2 times, 2 visits today)
About Author
