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In the Badlands of the American Great Plains, a 'bad' landscape is teeming with life and crucial lessons about environmental entanglement and the complexities of stewardship.
Badlands (working title) | Documentary Feature
Est 90 mins, currently in production
Badlands (working title) is set in and around the Badlands of South Dakota, a landscape sculpted by erosion, prairies, and vast skies. 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 film explores privatization to public funding, indigenous sovereignty to colonial history, nuclear armament to environmental preservation. The film becomes as much about the Badlands as it is about deep time, human definitions of nature, technological transformations of the landscape, how perceptions and ideology shape the land itself, and the future of our environmental entanglements.
Badlands is part of the multi-format documentary project, Topography. Supported by Catapult Documentary Film Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts Residency and Project Space, McEvoy Family Award for Film/Video, Badlands National Park Arts Residency.
Director, Producer, Editor, Cinematographer, Sound: Hannah Jayanti
Director, Producer, Virtual Cinematographer: Alexander Porter
