Who Stole the Sky?

Across arid lands, environmental change is often framed through two dominant colonial tropes: desertification and overgrazing. These enduring narratives routinely blame nomadic pastoralism for what are deemed ruined landscapes. Today, backed by the UN and other international bodies, the narratives serve as alibis for state encroachment into Indigenous territories and continue to shape how degradation is managed in dryland ecologies.

Set against a prolonged drought and grazing ban in Inner Mongolia, 'Who Stole the Sky?' is an experimental film that resists the universalising discourse of desertification. As sand-control projects and intensive land use spread, herder communities question how these interventions disrupt weather patterns and livelihoods. Using phone-based social media footage scaled to a towering screen, the film traces vanishing clouds, teetering fencelines and disrupted rains through a constellation of agents — herders, camels, spacecraft, rivers and planted vegetation — offering a layered, necessarily incomplete account of the slow violence unfolding across the steppe.