Film screening dates forthcoming*
The New Mexico Documentary Incubator Grants Program (NMDIG) has two core objectives. The first is to provide financial and technical support to emerging and early-career documentary filmmakers across New Mexico. The grants help enable documentarians to develop their creative filmmaking talent with an emphasis on building interest and capacity in documentaries that address community issues and challenges. The second objective is to sustain the incubation of documentary filmmaking talent by providing a clearing house for supportive resources and a forum for professional critique and exchange. Thanks to our collaborators, in addition to the grant funding, the selected filmmakers are provided access to studio space, technical training, and advice from well-established New Mexico film related professionals and institutions.
Film Title: A Raven Croaked Like a Witch from a Dead Pine
A Raven Croaked like a Witch from a Dead Pine is a short film that examines the intersections of adobe, land, ranching culture, and military occupation in New Mexico. Footage spans cattle ranches located within and adjacent to White Sands Missile Range and the downwinder communities of Carrizozo, San Antonio, and Tularosa. These landscapes are interwoven with oral histories from the filmmaker’s family—multigenerational ranchers in the Tularosa Basin—alongside archival material and declassified ballistics imagery. Stories of encounters with cougars, wailing ghosts in the night, cadavers found in arroyos, long-lost rifles unearthed from the sand, satanists in the bosque, and the mysterious orbs of light known for generations as La Luz del Llano circulate throughout the film. Together, these narratives reflect what material culture scholars describe as vernacular epistemologies: ways of knowing shaped through embodied labor, environmental memory, and long-term habitation. A Raven Croaked like a Witch from a Dead Pine traces the lived experience of a landscape where ranching, myth, and memory coexist with the ongoing presence of military occupation. The title is drawn from Edward Abbey’s novel, Fire on The Mountain.