Filming the First Climate Change
(11/24/2009) On the northwest coast of Alaska, 120 miles above the Arctic Circle in the Chukchi Sea, the barrier island of Kivalina is
 Millie Hawley
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27 acres and shrinking.
For the native Inupiaq people of the Kivalina, population 420, “climate change isn’t about going green, it’s about survival,” said Gina Abatemarco, a summer resident of Amagansett who is directing and co-producing a feature-length documentary about Kivalina’s plight titled “The Kivalina Project.”
“The island is disappearing,” Ms. Abatemarco said in a telephone interview from New York. The people of Kivalina “are losing their land, and as they lose their land, they’re losing their identity.”
She first read of Kivalina more than two years ago in an article that appeared in The Los Angeles Times. The tiny island is on a path to become North America’s first victim of climate change. A sliver of land that was long buffered from rough fall and winter seas by the slush and sea ice that formed at its shores each fall, it has lost some of its natural seasonal protection as Arctic temperatures gradually increase. Ice forms later in the year, and without the natural storm protection it affords, the island has suffered severe erosion. Since 1953, its acreage has been cut in half. Some scientists believe it will be underwater within 10 years, according to Ms. Abatemarco.
For these and other reasons, its residents voted almost 20 years ago to begin the process of relocation, an expensive proposition estimated to cost up to $400 million. Last year, the people of Kivalina filed a federal lawsuit alleging that several oil companies, electric utilities, and a coal company had conducted a long campaign to “mislead the public about the science of global warming,” thus contributing to the “public nuisance of global warming . . . ,” according to an article in The New York Times.
“There’s no one, really, to call and say ‘hey, my island is going underwater due to climate change and I need to get off,’ “ Ms. Abatemarco said. “The Kivalina Project,” the director said, is “the story of the first climate-change refugees in America. . . . They are hunters, fishermen, and people that don’t know how to survive in a city. You can’t just put them in a housing project in Anchorage.”
Gina Abatemarco on location in Kivalina
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Ms. Abatemarco, who graduated in 2003 from the film and television program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has written several feature films and directed a number of shorts, including one about Kivalina, “My Super Sea Wall,” which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. She is a founder of the Fusion Film Festival at N.Y.U., which promotes the work of women filmmakers.
After graduating from N.Y.U. and working for a year as Brian De Palma’s personal assistant, Ms. Abatemarco spent an extended period traveling, living, and working abroad. She lived in Paris, Berlin, and Sofia, Bulgaria, before returning home to the United States, where it seemed to her that climate change had suddenly become the most important issue of the day, or perhaps it was only that she was paying attention to that part of the news for the first time.
“My interest had never been the environment. I was more of a romantic,” she said, but somehow being back home, considering her future in a different way, and reports about climate change had a profound effect on her. “I was beyond devastated,” she said.
“At the time I found this article, I was working on the classic road movie that I thought defined my generation.” When she learned about Kivalina, she felt immediately that this was the real story that would define her generation. “They were experiencing my worst fears in terms of what climate change could take away, and they weren’t experiencing it in 20 years, they were experiencing it today.”
She decided to make “a film about climate change that wasn’t told through science, but was told through emotions.”
“Alaska was never a place I wanted to go,” Ms. Abatemarco said. “I didn’t know anything about Eskimo culture. I had no money to get there.” A grant from the Berlin Film Festival enabled her to travel to Kivalina to make a short documentary that dealt in part with what she described as the island’s “crumbling, pathetic sea wall.”
“Through that grant, I got to start developing this project,” she said. “It allowed me to go to the island and introduce myself.” Getting to and staying on the island is no small feat. Kivalina can be reached by air and sea in the summer and in the winter is also accessible by “land.” It has no hotels or restaurants and only one store.
Since that first trip, Ms. Abatemarco has had the opportunity to live on the island for months at a time. “The people in Kivalina are my friends now. I’ll know them for a lifetime.” She has gone ice fishing and seal hunting and talked with some of the country’s last whale hunters.
Her work there has been supported through a $25,000 Richard Vague/Chris Columbus film production grant, given to alumni directing their first feature films, and by the Tribeca Film Institute. “We have a very professional crew, but this has been done on a very low budget,” said Ms. Abatemarco. She is almost done with production, but is still looking for sponsorship to complete “The Kivalina Project.”
To sweeten the deal for potential investors, Ms. Abatemarco teamed up with Women Make Movies, a nonprofit media arts organization, so that 100 percent of contributions to “The Kivalina Project” are tax deductible.
Those wishing to support the documentary can contact Ms. Abatemarco by e-mail at gabatemarco@gmail.com. More information about Kivalina and her film can be found at thekivalinaproject.com.