“Their agenda is that they want an activist film that goes into the history of their struggle and presents a contemporary portrait of what’s happening in Black Mesa right now. But it’s not an activist film,” says Camille Summers-Valli of the subjects of her film Big Mountain, currently slated for release later in 2016.

“I think ultimately it has undertones of activism because of the subject matter, but an activist film follows a certain structure and I’m definitely moving more towards something else.”

Big Mountain follows the lives of around 25 indigenous Navajo in Arizona, attempting to preserve their traditional way of life on the land. They are all that remains of a population of 11,000, relocated from their ancestral homes in the 1970s.

“There’s a lot of conspiracy theories about the way this happened,” says Summers-Valli, “but ultimately the corporate interests of a coal mining company managed to lobby the government to pass a law that moved these people off the land.”