Badlands

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.

Period: 2021–present
Status: In Production
Form: Feature documentary · approximately 90 minutes

Aerial passage through eroded terrain

The project

Badlands is a feature documentary in production in western South Dakota. It reimagines the kind of storytelling needed for today's ecological challenges by centering land as the protagonist. A paleontologist holds a 32-million-year-old bone fragment and imagines a prehistoric sea. Lakota ethnobotanist Richard T. Sherman finds unexploded bombs among healing plants. Guided by Sherman's Indigenous Stewardship Model, the film brings Indigenous, scientific, and historical perspectives together around land use and environmental justice.

Documentary field notes

We arrived in Badlands National Park as artists in residence and let the story emerge from the place. Across three trips, we filmed for another eight weeks and gathered more than ninety hours of material. The film now feeds a second work, Strata: while we edit Badlands, its scenes and documentary method become material for a generative narrative system, which sends new visual and narrative suggestions back into the film.

What others saw

“A seemingly 'bad' barren landscape is revealed to be teeming with life, buried histories, and crucial lessons about stewardship in a rapidly changing world.”— Sundance Institute, on Badlands

Blue-gloved hands hold an archival field card bearing a black-and-white Badlands landscape photograph. — Archival landscape card in gloved hands

01 / 07

My role

I am co-director, producer, and virtual cinematographer on Badlands. Hannah Jayanti leads the film as director. My work includes the spatial-imaging practice through which landscapes, archival evidence, and different scales of observation can meet the film's more intimate documentary encounters.

Supported by

Residency
Developed with support from Badlands National Park's Artist-in-Residence program
2021–2022
Funder
Supported by Catapult Film Fund
2022
Funder
Supported by the Sundance Institute Sandbox Fund
2024
Residency
Developed in residence at the Jacob Burns Film Center
2025

Selected credits

Alexander Porter: Co-Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
Delfina Vincenti: Associate Producer
Dr. Jeffrey Means: Advisor
Hannah Jayanti: Director / Producer / Cinematographer / Editor / Sound
Juan Pedro Agurcia: Associate Producer
Keith Wilson: Consulting Producer
Michele Graffieti: Designer
Richard T. Sherman: Consulting Producer

What others saw

Supported by

Selected credits

Links & presentations