Irish director Tom Burke’s Losing Alaska is a telling document for our times, and an absorbing account of how one Alaskan community of some 375 souls suffer the impact of global warming as rising water levels threaten their very existence. The film gets underway with Bob Dylan on the soundtrack, singing High Water; which seems entirely apposite, with overhead shots of the soupy-brown Alaskan landscape, pockets of melting ice and what they continually call ‘the river’ that is getting dangerously close.
The village of Newtok, population 375, is sinking, or slipping away, due to erosion and the thawing of the permafrost. The melting of the sea ice is swelling the body of water that surrounds the village.
The locals are feeling increasingly cut off and should anything dramatic happen in the course of a winter storm, it is a difficult place to get to by sea and air. Nathan, a single parent, rearing his son on his own at present, is cynical. “Life is too short to see us swimming to the nearest town which is about 40 miles, and the water is too cold.” At another point he recalls his nightmare of the previous night. “There was a tsunami in my dream, really scary.”
Losing Alaska was recently screened as part of the IFI Documentary Festival 2018 and was made with the assistance of Screen Ireland. It’s an important film, underscoring the troubled realities of climate change and its widespread ramifications.
The movie is followed by a panel discussion with Keelin & Ellie Montcrief.
