US Filmmaker Kayla Briët won the Best Female Documentary Director Award of the 14th International Uranium Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro 2025 for her film „Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History“. / Photo by Carmille Dudeck

Kayla is a composer, filmmaker and virtual reality artist of Prairie Band Potawatomi/ Neshnabe, Chinese, and Dutch-Indonesian decent. She is an artist exploring themes of belonging in multiple mediums of storytelling. Kayla's work has been exhibited by the Smithsonian Institute,  MoMA,  Adobe, National Geographic, PBS, and over 50 international film and music festivals.

Ways of Knowing is a 25-minute documentary about Navajo resilience to protect health, tradition, and land after enduring extensive uranium mining by the United States government, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting until the 1970s. Eight decades after the Manhattan Project which birthed the nuclear-industrial complex, Navajo and other Indigenous communities of the American Southwest continue to suffer from contaminated land and waterways, and scores of people sickened and killed by toxic exposure. 

Ways of Knowing started as a collaboration between traditional Diné storyteller Sunny Dooley and nuclear policy researcher Lovely Umayam to bridge policy and humanity in examining the United States’ nuclear weapons production legacy. Dooley, who is a producer of the film, envisions Ways of Knowing as a capstone to her life’s work of revitalizing Navajo story and tradition in the name of collective healing.

The 14th International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) of Rio de Janeiro was held at the Cinematheque of the Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio) from May 17 to May 31, 2025. Last October the IUFF was selected by the MoviemakerMagazine in Hollywood as one of the „25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World 2024“.  And earlier this year in March, the festival founders Márcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek accepted the Nuclear-Free Future Award 2025 in New York City. In October this year the festival will travel with a selection of the best films first to Berlin and in November to Window Rock in Arizona and Las Vegas in Nevada.

IUFF 2025 award winners 

https://uraniumfilmfestival.org/en/uranium-film-festival-rio-2025-award-winners

https://uraniumfilmfestival.org/en/uranium-film-festival-rio-2025-in-pictures

Contact

International Uranium Film Festival

norbert.suchanek@uraniumfilmfestival.org

uraniofestival@gmail.com

Festivalwebsite

https://uraniumfilmfestival.org

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