Badlands
Documentary Feature | est. 90 mins, in production
In the otherworldly Badlands of South Dakota, a seemingly ‘bad’ land is revealed to be teeming with life, buried histories, and urgent lessons about environmental protection.
Badlands is a feature documentary that reimagines storytelling needed for today’s ecological challenges by centering the land as the protagonist. Through poetic documentary and speculative virtual worlds, Badlands immerses viewers in the stewardship of contested lands, while imagining restorative futures.
The film is set in the dramatic Badlands of western South Dakota, a region sculpted by erosion, militarization, dispossession, and preservation. Parceled out between private land, federal land, and tribal land—lands transformed by bombing ranges, settlement, agriculture, and other forces—the region provides an extraordinary lens into the histories and politics that have shaped the North American landscape.
Badlands centers the land as the protagonist, and the narrative visits with humans and non-humans who have impacted the place over time. Guided by Richard T. Sherman’s ‘Indigenous Stewardship Model’ the film weaves together a multiplicity of perspectives on the land through ecologists, tribal members, paleontologists, ranchers, military historians, tourists, foragers, rangers, flora, and fauna. The past is summoned through archival material which unearths buried histories, while a speculative virtual landscape evokes resilient futures based in environmental justice.
Through intertwining documentary, archival, and speculative worlds, Badlands creates a layered portrait of place across vast scales. The film is a poetic yet urgent reckoning with climate change, indigenous sovereignty, and the challenges of fostering interdependent and accountable relationships between inhabitants of all landscapes.
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, Ken Corday Grow Grant, Mesa Refuge Residency, 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
Richard T. Sherman | consulting producer
Delfina Vincenti | associate producer
Juan Pedro Agurcia | associate producer
Michele Graffieti | designer
