“Demon Mineral” is a new documentary about life in the radioactive desert of the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest. Spanning the breadth of Diné Bikeyah, the sacred homelands of the Navajo, a landscape perforated by over 500 uranium mines, the film follows a group of indigenous scientists, engineers, and activists as they work to secure a vital living space.

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An anti-western, the film explores the legacy of uranium mining in Diné Bikeyah. There, 523 unremediated mines are scattered across an area the size of West Virginia. Water, air, traditions, and livelihoods have been threatened by contamination for the last four generations.

Some Diné adhere to the tenets in the following origin story: there is a demon who lives in the earth. He is content enough there, and will bother no-one unless disturbed, having been laid there by a formidable warrior. Uranium, for millions of years to come, is perhaps this demon made real.

A core character is the land itself – a landscape that to the naked eye looks devoid of water and has been derided repeatedly by the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies for being “subpar” and a “wasteland.” The reality is that there’s plenty of water, it’s just underground in a series of rich, cold aquifers, and those from the region knew how to live responsively with the environment and build full lives. This landscape became the iconic backdrop of John Wayne’s early films romanticizing the“conquest” of this “barren” space.

© Formidable Entities

A mixed media project, “Demon Mineral” includes evocative black & white infrared footage from Navajo Nation, found footage and color interviews conducted worldwide. The decision to shoot all contaminated lands in infrared black and white was taken as a way of signaling to viewers when they are looking at uranium exposure.

With this decision we are presenting the viewer with a metaphor: both radiation and infrared light are invisible to the naked eye. This decision acknowledges the landscape’s use in John Wayne’s black and white Westerns, which were shot during the very same years and on the very same land where the first mines were blasted and tell tales of mythological conquest.

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