Sandra Lahire’s films border on surrealism, shifting from the natural environment, to the built one, to a world in ruins. Serpent River, 1989, shows children playing outside the Uranium Capital Nursery School in Serpent River First Nation, an Anishinaabe First Nation in Ontario, Canada; later, footage of a whirling river and a nuclear power plant turbine accompany a voice-over describing a litany of potential perils of uranium mining, including leukaemia and bone marrow damage. We hear who profits from rare-earth mining and whose lives and lands are destroyed by it. These extractive processes