Grit

When Dian was 6 years old, she heard a deep rumble and turned to see a tsunami of mud barreling toward her village. Her mother scooped her up to save her from the boiling mud. Her neighbors ran for their lives. Sixteen villages, including Dian’s, were wiped away.

A decade later, nearly 60,000 people have been displaced from what was once a thriving industrial and residential area in East Java. Dozens of factories, schools, and mosques are submerged 60 feet under a moonscape of cracked mud.

The cause? Lapindo, an Indonesian company drilling for natural gas in 2006, unleashed a violent, unstoppable flow of hot sludge from the earth's depths. It is estimated that the mudflow will not end for another decade. Shot over six years, GRIT bears witness to Dian's transformation from a young girl to a politically active teenager as she and her mother launch a resistance campaign against the drilling company.