Kiribati: Anote's Ark (2018)
I started with four rules:
1) A country as defined by the UN.
2) A commercially released film which is feature length (as defined by the BFI).
3) “The film would need to be either made in the country of origin, produced in it or meaningfully financed by the country.”
4) Horror as a preference where possible.
That’s it. Simple, I thought. Obviously the first rule went wrong very quickly. I’ve documented that. The countries were initially wildly optimistic and have been reduced to the canonical 193 (well, 193 plus two DVD-observing states). Horror hasn’t been possible in all cases. I’ve not struggled with the second rule yet. The third rule, however…
Kiribati is a small country spread over a vast area: 33 islands comprising 313 square miles of land amid 1,328,890 square miles of ocean. And they’ve never made a film.
Not one. And they need to get their skates on, because the country is going to be the first to be wiped out by global warming.
This blog is about films, so it’s perhaps not the best place to start a discussion about the seriousness of climate change. That should be left to… no, fuck it. This IS the place to discuss climate change. Everywhere is the place to discuss climate change. Climate change is the single greatest threat humanity has ever faced, and the response of most governments around the world has been to ignore it. It’s a problem too big to comprehend, too serious to underestimate yet too overwhelming to acknowledge. No one wants to know. When the two greatest champions of actually doing something about it are a young woman and a failed US presidential candidate, there’s something very wrong.
Well, the three greatest champions, because former President Anote Tong of Kiribati is also making noise. Which isn’t surprising as he was President of the very first country that’s going to be destroyed by climate change. (Typically, he’s been replaced by a President who has dismantled all of the work that he did and the country is now facing the exact fate Tong was worried about, but sooner than expected. “Sooner than expected” is the key phrase you’ll hear in all discussions of climate change, whether that’s ocean temperature increases, glacier melts or sea level rises.)
Anote’s Ark is a film made by a Canadian. It’s about Kiribati, filmed in Kiribati and mostly features Anote Tong as he tries desperately to get the rest of the world to listen to the problems Kiribati faces. Anote’s Ark fails my third rule completely. Not only is it made by a Canadian, without any funding from Kiribati at all, the Kiribati government rejected the film and claimed Matthieu Rytz (the writer/director) had misrepresented the situation. So it shouldn’t count. In the absence of any other possible film (because Kiribati has never made any other film – and the only other films which feature Kiribati are also externally-produced documentaries) I am choosing Anote’s Ark to represent Kiribati as a placeholder.
The documentary itself is very strong – it takes a serious topic and treats it rather more calmly than my own words here. This isn’t an angry documentary. Perhaps it should be – perhaps more good would have come of it had it been. We’ll never know. Instead we see Anote Tong try to draw attention to the plight of his people and offer a potential solution. It’s an extremely radical solution (his undersea city relies on technology we’ve not developed yet), but he’s at least trying. Throughout the documentary we see the slow, steady impact that the weather is having on the islanders. Going from a temperate climate without storms to suffering the strongest typhoon ever recorded globally would, you think, be the wake-up call people need. But apparently not. Even the residents of the islands seem as lost as their leaders. It makes for grim viewing, but Rytz at least takes a calm tone as he states Anote’s case.
As a placeholder, it’s a documentary I’m happy to accept. And who knows, perhaps the people of Kiribati will indeed make a film in the next couple of years. They’ll be doing it from underwater, though, because no matter how much the officials of governments around the world are trying to pretend it’s business as usual (and shutting down monitoring and scientific research is another way of trying to pretend) it’s becoming increasingly clear that exponential growth is simply not a term most people understand, but nature is determined to teach us all the same.
Our descendants will see Anote's Ark and wonder how we could ignore so clear a warning. They won’t be wrong.
Disc: DVD (Region 1, USA)
Source: eBay
Availability: Out of print but still widely available