Demon Mineral (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)

Now just a year away from its thirtieth birthday, Slamdance remains focused on low-budget films from emerging directors. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s alienated from the mainstream, though. The 2024 festival has specialist strands dealing with two areas that have been unexpectedly prominent in mainstream media of late. One of them is disability representation, which has been at the heart of a gratifying number of recent BBC dramas and comedies (even the TARDIS is wheelchair-accessible now). The other is indigenous representation, which has recently been on the mind of directors as different as Martin Scorsese and Taika Waititi, and which is central to Hadley Austin’s extraordinary, haunting documentary Demon Mineral.

Indeed, Demon Mineral adds a third topical subject to the festival – the aftermath of the mid-century rush for nuclear energy and weapons. If your favourite films of last year included Oppenheimer or Godzilla Minus One – and nearly everyone I know had one or both on their list – you’ll know this subject feels freshly relevant to a less stable world. What Demon Mineral proves is that even when Slamdance tackles the subject matter of modern blockbusters, it does so in a way that remains true to the festival’s ethos. Demon Mineral is hardly a film made to cash in on a trend, it’s made to push the conversation forward, to take risks and discuss it from a different angle – all things independent films should, in an ideal world, be doing.

In this case, Demon Mineral can be seen as a feature-length corrective to one of Oppenheimer‘s most glaring absences: the Native Americans who were displaced from their land in order to set up the huge laboratory at Los Alamos. Here, we see the nuclear rush entirely from the Navajo perspective. We learn that the Navajo had always been wary of the strange white mineral underneath their clifftops, even before white men named it “uranium”. The first interviewee, Terry Keyanna, recalls dropping a stone down a crack in the ground as a child and hearing it echo down, down, much further down than she ever thought possible. She remembers wondering, “Did I find the hole that leads to hell?”

The answer might be yes. As with Oppenheimer and Chernobyl, Demon Mineral is an inexhaustible source of horrifying-but-true facts: in one of the occasional moments where the film leaves the Navajo Reservation, we discover that Marie Curie’s grave contains uranium that is still detectable even after the body killed by it has turned to dust. We learn that the worst nuclear accident in American history happened on Navajo land, in the 1979 Church Rock uranium spill. That was four months after the much more publicised incident at Three Mile Island, which arguably did more than anything to galvanise the American anti-nuclear movement. Despite this, it remains little-known, and the governor of New Mexico refused to declare the site a federal disaster area.

All of this is very sobering and important, but it’s not what makes the film great. The post-Bowling for Columbine documentary boom saw a lot of films on similarly important subjects, but that didn’t mean they were great cinema; one of the most famous ones involved a politician talking over a PowerPoint presentation on climate change. From the start, Demon Mineral is fighting in a different weight class. Keyanna’s interview is shot in a strange, heavy monochrome that makes the bright desert sky look almost black, heavy with portent, and cinematographer Yoni Goldstein proves just as inventive when filming in colour. Even the on-screen text is memorably designed. It manages to shoot the deserts of Utah, New Mexico and Nevada in ways that you might call decolonised, in that these images bear no resemblance to the millions of Hollywood Westerns shot there. Those films, described by the voiceover as “whitewashed stories about men who wanted to love the land but couldn’t because they wanted too much from it”, are excerpted but are overdubbed with other, distinctly indigenous sounds, including some absolutely fantastic Navajo punk and heavy metal artists.

It’s an incredibly distinctive, inventive film, one whose true peers are a small but incredibly precious canon of recent documentaries making poetic statements about humanity’s troubled relationship with the environment: Michael Madsen’s similarly nuclear-centric Into Eternity, Jessica Beshir’s Faya Dayi, Hannah Jayanti’s Truth or Consequences. It is closer to Joshua Oppenheimer than Nolan’s Oppenheimer; if you cherish any of the films I’ve just mentioned, you will cherish this as well.

Graham’s Archive – Demon Mineral