About the Film

Indonesia is the world’s leading producer of nickel, a metal now central to the global clean-energy transition. From electric vehicles to grid-scale storage, lithium-ion batteries depend on nickel for performance and range. In an effort to capture more value at home, Indonesia has banned raw ore exports and rapidly expanded domestic smelting—fueling an industrial boom shaped heavily by Chinese capital, which controls an estimated 75 percent of the country’s nickel refining capacity. The result is a profound economic and geopolitical shift, unfolding at extraordinary speed.

Set in Sulawesi—the epicenter of Indonesia’s nickel boom—Nickel Land takes viewers inside vast open-pit mines and high-heat smelters where global climate ambitions collide with local realities. As coastlines are reshaped and communities absorb the environmental and social fallout of extraction, the film centers the human stories behind the minerals powering electrification, asking a simple but unsettled question: who benefits from this transition, and who bears its costs?