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hannah jayanti


In the magnificent Badlands of South Dakota, a seemingly ‘bad’ barren landscape is revealed to be teeming with life, buried histories, and crucial lessons about stewardship in a rapidly changing world.


Badlands (working title) | Documentary Feature
Est 90 mins, currently in production

Badlands (working title) is set in the magnificent Badlands of western South Dakota. Sculpted by erosion, militarization, dispossession, and preservation, the Badlands holds a storied and largely unknown past. Through a multiplicity of perspectives on land use, the film creates a deeply layered portrait of a place across time, history, scales and species.

Grounded in documentary footage, the film weaves together archival material and speculative virtual landscapes. Through poetic storytelling, the history of the land is revealed through paleontologists, ecologists, tribal members, ranchers, military historians, tourists, foragers, and rangers. The future is evoked through virtual landscapes that use emerging technology to imagine a world based in the hopeful and sustainable practices modeled by people in the film.

What emerges is a meditative yet urgent reckoning with climate change, indigenous sovereignty, settler colonial legacies, nature-culture boundaries, and the challenges of fostering more interdependent and accountable relationships between the inhabitants of all landscapes.


Badlands is part of the multi-format documentary project, Topography. Supported by Sundance Institute, Sandbox Films, Catapult Documentary Film Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts Residency and Project Space, McEvoy Family Award for Film/Video, UCSC, Ken Corday FDM Grow Grant, Agricultural Experiment Station Research Fellowship, Badlands National Park Arts Residency.

Credits
Hannah Jayanti | director, producer, editor, cinematographer, sound
Alexander Porter | co-director, producer, virtual production director
Keith Wilson | producer
Delfina Vincenti | associate producer
Juan Pedro Agurcia | associate producer
Michele Graffieti | designer
Richard T. Sherman | advisor