Human induced climate change is creating fast coastal landscape changes and during that process turn many indigenous communities into climate refugees.
Co-directed by Michael Kirby Smith and Andrew Burton, Newtok | The Water is Rising highlights demise of a population. Rising sea levels threaten Newtok, Alaska. The Arctic permafrost is melting at an increasing rate. Due to Polar Amplification the speed of climatic change in the Arctic is rather fast. To keep their culture and community intact, the Yup’ik residents must relocate their entire village upriver while battling governmental inaction. They will become some of America’s first climate refugees. This is a film about a village seeking justice in the face of climate disaster.
The sentiment among the natives of Alaska is fraught with Western journalists depicting Native stories wrong. Gaining and restoring trust is foundational before starting filming. Accurate dialog is key to initiate the project.
The Pulitzer Prize (Finalist, 2016) winner filmmakers Michael Kirby Smith and Andrew Burton have covered conflict, protest, natural disasters and more for outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Washington Post, TIME and Getty Images. In 2016 they set out to make a film that showed the impact of climate change on an American community in real time. They spent nearly 300 days in Newtok, Alaska, until production ended in 2020. In the coming years, they hope to continue supporting Newtok’s efforts to complete its move through the body of photography and reporting they completed during the creation of the film.
Marie Meade is a Yup’ik anthropologist and language professor at University of Alaska, Anchorage. Her family is originally from Kailavik, which is where the people of Newtok were located prior to the government-forced relocation to Newtok. She has been helping the film crew to conduct interviews with villagers in Yup’ik.
Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice: Part 1, Quentin Brown, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
Life on extreme ends of the world fascinate us with Human adaptability and effective resource use. Stalking for seals on ice is one of the best documented hunting technique which employs pure behavioral deception tactics. The hunter uses a cognitive ability called “theory of mind” to behaviorally jam the triggers for prey to escape. The hunter projects the world from the view point of the prey and adjusts own behavior to perfect the pursue. Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice (1968) by Quentin Brown was filmed under the supervision of the anthropologist Asen Balıkçı is a fantastic capture of Human abilities that have evolved in the Arctic.
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