In the Age of Climate Change

This program brings together recent documentaries that depict a globalized Arctic, including films from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greenland, Norway, and Russia. The films articulate how human rights issues in the Arctic are diverse and demonstrate distinct regional and national characteristics. These documentaries address issues of human rights from perspectives that range from insider and outsider, historical and contemporary, experimental and activist, personal and political, and include films by Indigenous directors. The films address questions of environmental impact, geopolitics, colonialism, and Indigenous rights in ways that are also transforming what audiences expect from Arctic filmmaking, moving away from depicting the region as a blank, unchanging, and isolated slate. Arctic documentary cinema functions as a central tool for sharing knowledge, expertise, and information about the impact of climate change. In this context, it is important to note that many contemporary Arctic Indigenous documentaries foreground how Indigenous knowledge, experiences and perspectives are routinely ignored in attempts to understand the impact of climate change through the paradigms of Western rationality and scientific expertise. Other contemporary Arctic documentaries consider the region’s history of colonialism. These deploy a wide range of styles, from hybrid documentary to the rockumentary, to tell these often marginalized and repressed stories. Many of the films bring together Indigenous and settler filmmakers to engage in coalitional politics, building bridges between communities in the process. Throughout the history of Arctic documentary, the question of ethos, and its relationship to human rights, has been paramount. Arctic explorers relied on – and abused – the ethical prerogative of documentary filmmaking to “prove” the significance of their journeys and expeditions. From Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) onward, ethnographers have relied on the documentary ethos as a voice of European and Western privilege to describe and dissect the North and the Arctic and its Indigenous inhabitants. To counteract these practices, women’s and feminist films about Arctic exploration have offered a gender-reflexive ethos that challenges the dominant patriarchal and heteronormat ive representations of the Arctic. And, with the rise of participatory documentary and video activism, Indigenous filmmakers have in recent years used the documentary form as a means of giving themselves a voice, and as a tool for bringing attention to the extraordinary and disproportionate effects of climate change in the Far North. In the twenty-first century, Arctic cinemas are a site of both local and global human rights struggles.

Scott MacKenzie & Anna Westerståhl Stenport,
Program Curators