Climate Refugees (Michael P. Nash, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Khristine Biver.  Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival 2010.

Climate Refugees serves as a sort of addendum to An Inconvenient Truth.  It seeks to give a human face to the inevitable immigration problem that arises, as there is less landmass to inhabit due to rising tides and environmentally ravaged lands.  The issue, then, is not convincing people that climate change is a reality; it is dealing with the people who are already displaced because their land is disappearing.

Director Michael Nash showed the film in Copenhagen, at the Sundance Film Festival, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and is presenting the film to Congress in hopes of inspiring policy change to deal with what will eventually be millions of people who are ejected from their land because of environmental circumstances.

He seeks to define these people as refugees, which, in political terms, are people who have been ejected from their land because of political or religious persecution.  There is no legislation in place to deal with the people who will be forced to move inland because of environmental issues, and Nash hypothesizes somewhat effectively about the racial and religious issues, in addition to the fact that having to share less space with more people will ultimately end in violence unless we, as a nation and as a world, enact policy now to help the millions of climate refugees.

Unfortunately, some of the message is lost in what is an amateur shooting style.  While interviewing political officials, awkward lighting creates bizarre skin tones that distract from the individual being interviewed.  The viewer focuses on the lacking skills of the gaffer rather than the political message.

Another unfortunate amateur mistake is the over dramatized presentation of Power Point-like slides giving the facts of where, why, how, and how many “refugees” are going to be affected by various climate changes.  The swelling music is so melodramatic; it can be off-putting to the viewer, thus detracting from the message.

In the post-movie Q&A, Nash made clear that the point of the film is to put a face to climate change, something he thought was lacking in An Inconvenient Truth.  Indeed, he makes it a point to stay away from the issues presented from An Inconvenient Truth and does not include an interview he did with Al Gore in order to make the film more relevant as an individual film and to avoid off-putting the political rightwing.  He does show some heart-tugging photos of children who, the viewer assumes, are being relocated due to climate change, but the one-off shots of children with no information about the individual also distracts from the ultimate message and comes across as melodramatic and manipulative rather than effective.  The shots are blatantly scripted, and it would have been more effective to show children in a more natural, candid environment, then a close-up shot of a watery-eyed child.

One major criticism that truly affects the power of the film is that Nash offers little in the way of solution.  It’s all well and good to be concerned about the issue at hand, but aside from encouraging lawmakers to enact policies to define the millions of individuals who will be effected by climate change as refugees, and thus will be given adequate aid from individual countries and the United Nations, the viewer is ultimately left feeling as one does when presented with a problem that hasn’t yet had a direct effect on us, but will eventually: hopelessly despondent, and ultimately cynical and apathetic.