Program 7:00p
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Oct 18, 2025 at 7:00 pm
To Use a Mountain
Co-presented with the Science New Wave Festival
Offsite
DCTV
87 Lafayette Street,
New York, NY 10013
We’re quite moved to come together with the Science New Wave to co-present the NYC premiere of Casey Carter’s haunting and visually stunning documentary To Use A Mountain, screening as part of the Science New Wave Festival XVIII at DCTV’s Cinema this October.
The film asks how we handle our most hazardous byproducts, and takes this question to the heart of America’s deserts and mountains, tracing the fallout of decisions made in 1982, when six potential sites were identified by the U.S. Department of Energy for long-term nuclear waste storage. To Use A Mountain investigates these fraught landscapes of disposal and the people who live among them, mixing physics, geology, and politics in a gripping radioactive travelogue.
As Festival Programmer Nate Dorr writes, this year’s Science New Wave lineup invites us to “look closely, get beneath the ground and beyond the visible cosmos, perceiving that which confounds and intrigues in search of deeper truth.”
We’re especially excited to note that producer Colleen Cassingham and director Casey Carter first met in the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio along with collaborator Magdalena Orellana who was also a part of the project from the start and added her signature artistry via the animation in the film. We’re delighted to also have served as the film’s fiscal sponsor and see it along its trajectory now finally out in the world meeting an audience. The film first premiered this past April at Visions Du Reel, where it won a Special Jury Award.
Join us at for this screening as a part of Labocine’s annual Science New Wave Festival now in its 18th year of redefining how science is seen and told on screen. Remember this event is offsite at DCTV — see you there!
Program
To Use a Mountain by Casey Carter
99 min, 2025, United States
What do we do with our most hazardous byproducts? Nuclear waste will be with us, still lethally radioactive, for millennia, and we’ve never found a solution for where to keep it. In 1982, six candidate sites were selected by the U.S. Department of Energy and reviewed for use in long term storage, to public consternation. To Use A Mountain investigates these fraught landscapes of disposal, and the people and places that must exist alongside them, mixing physics, geology, and politics in a gripping radioactive travelogue.
Program Duration: 99 mins
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
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.
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