(Mis)representing climate mobilities: lessons from documentary filmmaking

ABSTRACT

Climate migration discourses tend to misrepresent the complex realities and experiences of people whose lives are impacted by climate change. All too often, the images conjured are of inevitable, massive, and permanent cross-border movements, contributing to apocalyptic and securitised climate imaginaries that cast migration as a threat to western societies. Climate mobilities scholarship contradicts these assumptions as inaccurate and damaging, with empirical research demonstrating that climate change affects peoples’ realities and experiences of mobilities in varied and multi-faceted ways. And yet, despite these well-established findings, overly simplistic climate migration narratives still abound. This poses a question: how can climate mobilities be better represented? To explore this question, I analyse six documentary films that portray island and coastal communities facing the possibility of migration. Methodologically, I use filmmaker interviews to contextualise the films’ production. Drawing on mobilities theory, I show that understanding the representation process (filmmaking) requires close attention not just to the mobilities of people being represented, but also of those engaged in representation (the filmmakers) and the subsequent circulation of the representation (film) itself. Whose mobilities are prioritised in this process is crucial. Ultimately, I argue that climate mobilities scholarship can learn from the filmmakers’ experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate mobilities
• climate change
• representation
• imaginaries
• documentaries

Introduction

In a context of growing concern about climate change impacts, the possibility of ‘climate migration’ attracts considerable attention. Often, the image conjured is one of the inevitable and permanent cross-border movements on a massive scale (Bettini 2013). Climate mobilities research provides abundant contradictory evidence to such claims, based on studies that highlight ‘the multiplicity of climate change-related human mobility (involving immobility, relocation, circular mobility, etc.), its embedding in ongoing patterns and histories of movement, and the material and political conditions under which it takes place’ (Boas et al. 2022). And yet, sensationalist stories still abound; predicting millions of climate migrants forced from their homes by climate change, headed to the western world (Durand-Delacre et al. 2021).

The persistence of these narratives contributes to an apocalyptic imaginary of climate change, posing questions about (mis)representation. How can the debate on climate change and migration move beyond these problematic representations? I explore this question by focusing on a form of representation of climate migration which has up to now received little attention: documentary films. In the past two decades, documentary filmmaking has grown into a highly-valued commercial film genre imbued with the potential ‘to spark debate, mold public opinion, shape policy, and build activist networks’ (Nisbet and Aufderheide 2009, 450). There is also growing recognition in the social sciences that filmmaking as a process can be analogous, or indeed integral to qualitative research. Social scientists can learn from filmmakers’ experiences (Callahan 2015; Fitzgerald and Lowe 2020).

I begin with a brief presentation of climate mobilities scholarship, showing how it has so far apprehended (mis)representations of the (non-)migrant communities whose realities and experiences of climate change it seeks to describe. In the analysis, I focus on six films that portray island or coastal populations whose livelihoods are threatened by rising sea levels and who are aware of displacement risk. Methodologically, I draw primarily on interviews with the filmmakers, underpinned by and cross-referenced with film analysis and critical readings of related materials including the films’ websites, promotional materials and film reviews. I pay particular attention to the context in which documentary (mis)representations of climate mobilities are produced, including the filmmakers’ initial motivations, early encounters with potential subjects, financial considerations of the filmmaking process and final output. I identify three modes of filmmaking practice: ‘searching’, ‘following’ and ‘dwelling’, each defined by the relationship between filmmakers’ mobilities and their subjects’ mobilities. I argue that when filmmakers let their subjects guide the filming (following), or when they remain in place with them (dwelling), the documentaries can provide a more nuanced representation of how climate change relates to human mobility than when they prioritise their objectives and mobilities (searching). I show how decisions taken at the editing and post-production stage can significantly reinforce or temper the decisions made during filming. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how climate mobilities scholarship can draw lessons from filmmakers’ experiences.

Climate migration as misrepresentation of climate mobilities

Research into the relationship between climate change and human migration is currently undergoing a shift ‘from migration to mobility’ (Nature Climate Change 2019). The reason for this shift can be traced to a growing dissatisfaction with the analytical value and political uses of the term ‘climate migration’, which has increasingly captured attention in the news, academia and policy circles in the past two decades (Boas et al. 2019). Climate migration tends to be represented as a linear, permanent, cross-border phenomenon, singularly driven by climate change. Proponents of ‘climate mobilities’ deem this inaccurate, misleading and even damaging. Farbotko (2022), for instance shows how a linear climate migration frame can problematically assume exodus from climate-impacted places, and disregard the preferences and mobilities of the local population.

Detailing the arguments behind this shift in terminology requires defining the concept of ‘mobility’. While the term is often used synonymously with migration, I use it here in the sense proposed by mobilities theory, which lends ‘mobility’ distinct analytical value (Sheller and Urry 2006). Following Timothy Cresswell (2010, 18), mobility can be defined as involving three intersecting dimensions: ‘a fragile entanglement of physical movement, representations, and practices’. Based on this definition, the emerging field of climate mobilities (Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019; Boas et al. 2019, 2022; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019) can be understood as investigating (a) actual climate mobilities; (b) the practices and experiences involved in climate mobilities; and (c) representations of climate mobilities. Although interdependent, these three aspects can be distinguished for analytical purposes. Many studies take one or the other as their starting point for inquiry.

Researchers focusing on (a) actual climate mobilities describe the complex reasons why people move (or stay) and trace the details of their journeys. Contrary to common descriptions of climate migration that emphasise the climate as the dominant, if not single driver behind migration, climate mobilities scholarship points to migration’s multi-causal nature. It argues that social, economic, political, cultural and environmental factors all play a role in decisions to move and that any attempt to isolate one over the others necessarily misses a crucial part of the picture (Black and Collyer 2011). Researchers note the tendency for climate migration research and narratives to ignore the colonial histories (Whyte, Talley, and Gibson 2019; Boas 2022; Farbotko 2022) and extractive relationships (Lunstrum, Bose, and Zalik 2015) that make populations vulnerable to forced displacement in the first place. Many climate mobilities studies also contradict the assumption that populations impacted by climate change move at all. Some may become ‘trapped’ or ‘involuntarily immobile’ (Black et al. 2014; Zickgraf 2019; Blondin 2022). When people do move, trajectory ethnographies and other mobile methods show how complex and diverse their journeys are (Boas et al. 2020; Schapendonk and Steel 2014).

Actual mobilities are often discussed in relation with (b) (non-)migrants’ practices and experiences. Climate mobilities researchers highlight how important perceptions of both climate change and migration are, and how attachment to one’s home, land, and culture means many individuals and communities resist the prospect of being uprooted by climate change, preferring in-situ adaptation measures instead (Adams 2016; Farbotko 2018; van der Geest et al. 2019). Others explore how the experiences of (non-)migrants may be influenced by aspects of their identities (e.g. caste, gender, race, sexuality) (Baldwin 2012; Reid 2014; Rothe 2017). These studies’ findings run counter to portrayals of climate migrants as an undifferentiated (though heavily racialised) mass of people on their way to the West.

And yet, despite this abundant analytical critique of climate migration, research into (c) representations of climate mobilities shows that the same long-debunked, reductive narratives continue to emerge, attracting considerable attention. Today, climate migrants are still largely portrayed as both victims of climate change and threats to western societies (Ransan-Cooper et al. 2015; Russo and Wodak 2019). The figure of the climate migrant is heavily racialised and gendered, typically portrayed in news articles and reports as non-white ‘racialised others’, usually women and children. When migrant men are represented, they are cast either as vulnerable or threatening (Baldwin 2012; Methmann 2014; Reid 2014; Rothe 2017). The policy implications of these representations tend to combine patronising humanitarian narratives and white saviour tropes with securitised responses aiming to protect western countries from the predicted influx of people (Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013). In short, dominant discourses continue to misrepresent climate mobilities. The repeated return of problematic climate migration narratives poses a difficult question for climate mobilities scholarship: how can it ensure that the multi-faceted, non-linear, and indeed less sensational phenomena it describes are better represented?

Climate migration in the climate change imagination

Climate mobilities exemplify a challenge inherent to climate change in general: its enormity, complexity, and diversity of its impacts are difficult to grasp, difficult to see. Consequently, climate change has to be made knowable, and visible, through representational practices that are the result of, but also contribute to, broader climate imaginaries (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011). Following Hulme (2021, 230), ‘climate imaginaries can be understood as collectively shared sets of beliefs, narratives, technologies, discourses and practices that condition what climate futures are thought of as possible, likely or (un)desirable’. These imaginaries are historically and geographically situated, that is, they are context-dependent, contested, and evolving (Hulme 2021). Crucially, ‘imagination is not external to the object of study (climate change) but actively produces it as an event’ (Yusoff and Gabrys 2011, 520). Imaginaries are shaped by the tools and techniques of the various scientific and cultural practices that produce them. How we imagine climate change shapes how we act on it, and so has material effects on the world.

Of particular relevance to climate migration is the success of violent climate imaginaries, resilient even in the face of effective critical deconstruction (Benner et al. 2019). Indeed, in the case of climate migration, ‘an apocalyptic imaginary underlies much representation’ (Farbotko 2017, 73). Climate mobilities scholars also diagnose the inverse relationship, pointing to climate migration’s strong ‘discursive grip’ (Bettini 2019, 339) on climate change imaginaries: reinforcing catastrophist, dystopian and security-focused visions of the future marked by large scale population displacement against which rich nations must protect themselves. So, beyond seeking better – less deterministic, less securitised – representations of climate mobilities, mobilities theory opens the question whether representations can contribute to alternative climate imaginaries that more accurately envision climate change impacts and lead to effective support for those affected. Understanding how representations of climate mobilities are produced and circulated therefore matters a great deal, because when we repeatedly produce or select one sort of image to represent climate migration, we contribute to one imaginary or another, and tend to marginalise the alternatives. Paying attention to the social, political and cultural power of images representing this future – and to the power dynamics influencing how they are created and interpreted – is vital to our understanding of what lies ahead in a climate-changed future (Schneider and Nocke 2014).

The process of communicating climate change and its impacts can be understood as ‘an ongoing circuit or loop’ made of ‘three distinct but interlinked moments’: the moments of production, the visual text and consumption (O’Neill and Smith 2014, 74). Studies on the first focus on the conditions and practices that lead to visualisation, the second on the form and content of the visual itself and the third on the meanings viewers make from the visual. Of the three, the moment of production is the least studied, even though it is ‘particularly pertinent’ for ‘questioning power relations’ (O’Neill and Smith 2014, 84). So, in what follows, I explore how mobilities theory can help better understand the ‘moment of production’ of climate migration representation, how it relates to the other two moments, and how it both contributes to and is influenced by broader climate change imaginaries.

Climate change communication scholars have studied diverse images including news pictures, visual art, adverts, films, model outputs, scientific diagrams, maps and iconic photographs (O’Neill and Smith 2014; Schneider and Nocke 2014). Documentary films are comparatively little studied, though they offer fertile ground for inquiry into climate representations and imaginaries. In the introduction to their edited book Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, Cresswell and Dixon invite us to see film as ‘the visual representation of a mobile world’ (2002, 4), or ‘the temporary embodiment of social processes that continually construct and deconstruct the world as we know it’ (2002, 3–4). As moving images, films are representations, the meaning of which is never independent of the viewer. But films are also practices: they are made by groups of people in a variety of locations, who use specialised tools and techniques while following (or breaking) certain norms and conventions, and who form part of an industry, with its own political economy. Films are also mobile objects, materialised in physical and digital copies, the distribution of which is facilitated or hindered by specific and often competing communication networks and infrastructures (cinemas, television networks, online streaming and sharing and so on). Studying documentary (mis)representations, therefore, requires tracing the many intertwined journeys involved in representations of climate mobilities, paying attention not just to the actual mobilities of the people being represented, but also to the filmmakers’ mobilities, and to the films’ subsequent circulation.

Methods

To identify candidate documentaries for analysis, I used keyword searches in online film databases (IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Kanopy) and on YouTube. Searches used permutations of the terms ‘climate’, ‘environment(al)’ and ‘eco(-)’, alongside ‘migrant(s)’, ‘migration(s)’, ‘refugee(s)’, or ‘displacement’. I also identified documentaries using related video suggestions on each platform and mentions in the academic literature. The final list is composed of 22 documentaries (Online Appendix) which can be chronologically divided into three phases: 10 documentaries released in 2000–2009; seven in 2010–2014; and five in 2016–2019. I focus on the second phase. These seven films offer a greater diversity of approaches in terms of style, tone, and content than prior or later releases. The production and release of these films also coincide with a period of rapidly growing interest in climate migration (c. 2005–2014). These seven films have also received more attention than most in academic discussions and reviews (Deloughrey 2017; Kelman 2011; Murray 2015; Troon 2020; Weik von Mossner 2012, 2015; Wolffram 2012). Six of the filmmakers responded positively to interview requests, so only one documentary was dropped from the in-depth analysis.¹ The final list is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Documentaries selected for analysis.

Title	Date and country of first release	Director(s) (and ref. code)	Runtime	Synopsis (as provided in press materials)
Shored Up	January 2013 (USA)	Kalina, Ben	87 mins	Shored Up is an urgent call to action in the face of accelerating sea-level rise, presenting the devastation of Hurricane Sandy as a window into the future. When Superstorm Sandy devastated the East Coast, it was a wake-up call to a new reality. Shored Up takes us to the heart of this climate change controversy, following communities in New Jersey and North Carolina where politics, economics and science collide. Beginning 3 years before Sandy hit and following the debates over beach replenishment and other attempts to hold back the sea, Shored Up is a convincing call for action along our coasts. As the oceans rise and storms flood our towns and cities, we have a choice to make: do we continue to develop as we have in the past, ignoring clear risks and danger? Or, do we allow science to guide our policies for the future  …  before it's too late.
There Once was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho	January 2010 (New Zealand)	March, Briar	81 mins	What if you had to leave your home forever? Takuu, a tiny atoll in Papua New Guinea, contains the last Polynesian culture of its kind. Facing escalating climate-related impacts, including a terrifying flood, community members Teloo, Endar, and Satty, take us on an intimate journey to the core of their lives and dreams. Will they relocate to war-ravaged Bougainville – becoming environmental refugees – or fight to stay? Two visiting scientists investigate on the island, leading audience and community to a greater understanding of climate change.
The Island President	September 2011 (USA)	Schenk, Jon	101 mins	The Island President is the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a man confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced – the literal survival of his country and everyone in it. After bringing democracy to the Maldives after 30 years of despotic rule, Nasheed is now faced with an even greater challenge: as one of the most low-lying countries in the world, a rise of three feet in sea level would submerge the 1200 islands of the Maldives enough to make them uninhabitable (…)
Climate Refugees: The Global Human Impact of Climate Change	July 2010 (USA)	Nash, Michael P.	86 mins	There is a new phenomenon in the global arena called ‘Climate Refugees’. A climate refugee is a person displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters. Such disasters result from the incremental and rapid ecological change, resulting in increased droughts, desertification, sea-level rise, and the more frequent occurrence of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, fires, mass flooding and tornadoes. All this is causing mass global migration and border conflicts. For the first time, the Pentagon now considers climate change a national security risk and the term climate wars is being talked about in war-room like environments in Washington D.C.
The Hungry Tide	June 2011 (Australia)	Zubrycki, Tom	89 mins	The central Pacific nation of Kiribati is expected to be one of the first countries to disappear as a result of climate change. […] The Hungry Tide shows clearly the tragic impact of climate change on Kiribati, and exposes the stark global inequalities driving the global warming phenomenon. The film personalises the story by following the life and work of Maria Tiimon, who evolves to become one of the most prominent advocates for the rights of Pacific Islanders. Originally from Kiribati, Maria works for an organisation in Sydney as an impassioned campaigner for her sinking nation. But right from the start, Maria finds herself frequently torn between the needs of her family on Kiribati and her role on the world stage.
ThuleTuvalu	April 2014 (Switzerland)	van Gunten, Matthias	97 mins	Two places at the edge of our planet are making headlines due to climate change: Thule, Greenland, becuase of record ice melts there; and Tuvalu, because this remote Pacific island nation is one of the first countries on the verge of sinking as a result of rising sea levels. Whereas for us the warming of the planet occurs solely in the media, it is changing the entire existence for the inhabitants of Thule and Tuvalu. The film portrays how they are forced to abandon their traditional way of life as they move towards an unknown future.

Studies investigating (mis)representations of climate change and migration tend to focus on the representations alone but, guided by mobilities’ theory emphasis on the practices that shape and circulate representations, I focus in this paper on the making of the documentary films, contextualising their production. For this, I draw primarily on interviews with the filmmakers, allowing detailed accounts of the representational choices involved in making each film. Six film directors were interviewed over Skype between September and October 2019. The interviews were semi-structured and lasted 45 [30–75] minutes on average. The overarching aim of the interview process was to investigate the various mobilities involved in the planning, making, editing and release of these documentaries. Four main themes were raised with each filmmaker: (1) the filmmaker’s original inspiration, intentions and expectations for the film; (2) the film’s production, including locations visited and people interviewed; (3) the film’s post-production, particularly editing choices and (4) the film’s release, reach and reception.

The interviews also included film-specific questions designed to explore how and why the directors chose to represent their subjects the way they did. These questions were based on preparatory film analysis consisting of two separate critical viewings, as well as repeated viewings of segments of interest. Each viewing was guided by questions focused on the films as visual representations (i.e. ‘the moment of the visual text’). The first viewing focused on the identity and presentation of the protagonists or interviewees, the locations visited, and the narrative tone and style. The second viewing focused on movement, asking where the film takes the viewer and what mobilities are represented on screen. To cross-check the filmmakers’ answers and gain a more detailed sense of the films’ reach and reception, I also draw on ratings, reviews, awards, screening locations and box office figures. Available information was drawn on the films respective websites, various online film databases (IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, BoxOffice Mojo, the films’ Wikipedia pages) and in an email exchange with the filmmakers. Text and images from the films’ websites and press kits were also used to inform the analysis.

Results and Discussion

Motivations, intentions and practical constraints on filmmakers’ mobilities

Filmmakers’ motivations, interests and intentions

Asking the filmmakers about their intentions rapidly revealed that none had initially set out to make a documentary explicitly on ‘climate migration’ or any analogous subject. The early stages of pre-production, some starting years before filming, were guided by more general thematic interests and story-telling principles. All but one of the filmmakers indicated a general interest (prior to filming) in climate change and its impacts, or environmental issues in general. For example, Kalina conceived of his film as an exploration of ideas about ‘the control of nature’, drawn from a book of the same name (McPhee 1989). The filmmaker who was thinking most explicitly in terms of climate change was Nash, who was asking himself: ‘is there a human face of climate change? If there is, what does it look like?’. Van Gunten put his intentions into similar words:

I find it a crazy situation that the human being is changing the planet in a way that [sic] we don't know about the outcome. So, I was interested to go and see what happens to people who experience this change in their lives.

However, this thematic interest in climate change was not the primary focus for most of the filmmakers. Instead, all emphasised the desire to find and tell new and unusual stories as equally if not more important. Their aim was to explore something they ‘had never seen before’; to tell ‘stories that aren’t being told, [about people whose] voices have never been heard’; stories that are ‘a little out ahead of where the public is, and possibly where the funders are’. Zubrycki explained this in terms of documentaries’ potential to raise awareness about little-known issues. For him this meant shining a light on the Pacific as a place ‘where people lived, where people worked’, a place that most Australians had little awareness about. It was particularly important for the filmmakers that the stories they tell be human stories that personalise the issues: in this instance climate change, which they perceived as an all-too-abstract problem. The only exception to this focus on human experiences was for Kalina. He did not primarily set out to make ‘a character-driven film’, acknowledging this meant Shored Up would remain ‘a bit more wonky [sic] than you would want you're if you're trying to reach a broad audience’.

Overall, the filmmakers shied away from associations with a political agenda or militant filmmaking. For example, van Gunten said he likes ‘to make films that have to do with our time, and with the human being. My first interest was neither ecological nor political’. During filming, March was reluctant to think of her film in activist terms. Even though Nash’s film eventually took on an expository style – campaigning for recognition of climate refugees’ plight – he emphasised this was not his initial intention. His purpose was to go into the world, investigate the impacts of climate change on people, and ‘just tell the truth’ about what he found. This is worth highlighting because it shows the importance of the wider discursive context on climate change. At the time these projects were formed (c.2004–2009), the existence of climate change was still widely contested even in mainstream media.

Settling on the film’s subject: encounters with people, places, projects

In most cases, the documentary projects took shape as the filmmakers homed in on a particular place, person, or project that gave them something tangible or active to focus their inquiry and cameras on. In four cases, this encounter first occurred indirectly, via articles in the news (Kalina, Shenk, van Gunten) and a university magazine (March). The articles offered examples of a place or community affected by climate change, people whose ways of living or experiences caught the filmmakers’ attention. In some cases, it was the exceptional nature of these places that intrigued them. For March, it was the extreme isolation of Takuu Atoll. Thule and Tuvalu fascinated van Gunten because they are ‘at the edges of the map’. For Kalina, it was ‘a very good big beach replenishment project that was scheduled for the island […] I chose to locate the film there because it was this active thing […] that we could film’, illustrating human attempts to control nature. In other cases, the encounter was with a charismatic character, who would become the film’s lead protagonist. Shenk, for example, speaks of Nasheed as the key influence on the film’s theme, after reading of him in the news: ‘I wasn’t really looking to make an environmental or climate change film, [I just] fell in love with him as a character’. Zubrycki re-organised his film (and re-pitched it to his funders) upon meeting Maria Tiimon, whose work and personal life the documentary would follow. The upcoming Copenhagen Conference (COP15) also provided a crucial narrative element in these two documentaries. Both Mohammed Nasheed and Maria Tiimon were preparing for the conference during the filming. The only exception to all this is Nash’s Climate Refugees. His approach was far more open and general, to step out into the world ‘in search of the human face of climate change’, rather than choose just one place, person, or project to focus on, but still placed significant emphasis on personalising climate impacts. The importance of novelty and personalisation to the filmmakers may help explain a common finding about climate visuals across various media: that they often feature images of people (O’Neill and Smith 2014). They widely assume that humanising their stories will, as a rule, make for a more engaging narrative and successful film.

Financial and logistical considerations enable and constrain filmmakers mobilities

Beyond norms and standardised practices, financial and logistical considerations significantly enable or constrain the initial designs of documentary projects. The filmmakers’ access to capital and logistical support during the project planning stages are important determinants of how they can conceive and make them. For example, Nash’s open-ended search for people impacted by climate change involved travel to over 40 countries, some of which never featured in the film. Similarly, Shenk’s shadowing of Nasheed on multiple international trips required relatively large budgets and a producer willing to take a gamble in case doors were closed to the film crew. In both cases, the filmmakers had the means to go where they needed to fulfil the concept of their film. In contrast, less well-resourced filmmakers (Kalina, March) – who were generally less experienced, with smaller professional networks – tended to work in very small teams and stay put in a single location or limited geographical range. Kalina crowdfunded his film, which only allowed him to cover New Jersey and North Carolina, abandoning early plans for a trip to Florida. March completed her film in two trips. She had to use the outputs of the first to convince funders to back the second. van Gunten and Zubrycki, as more experienced filmmakers with better established relationships with TV producers, represent more in-between cases. These prosaic considerations played an important part in determining how the films were made.

Three modes of mobile filmmaking: searching, following, dwelling

In this section, I outline various practices which, when taken together, correspond to three dominant modes of mobile filmmaking practice: searching, following and dwelling. Each mode prioritises different mobilities. They involve different forms of travel, as the filmmakers arrive on location by boat or plane, as well as different filming and post-production technologies, all of which enable very different points of view. The resulting representations of mobilities on screen vary from reductive, linear representations suggesting a simplistic idea of climate migration to much richer, complex understandings of entangled mobilities. Ultimately, these differences in representation and underlying practices carry important political implications and contribute to different climate imaginaries. I note that the three modes are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they can co-exist within a single film. One may dominate in the preparation or filming stages only to be undermined, tempered, or reinforced during the documentary’s editing, post-production, or distribution.

Searching for ‘the human face of climate change’

The searching mode prioritises the filmmaker’s mobility. This is exemplified by Climate Refugees, in which the main protagonists are the filmmaker and his team. Nash describes their approach as exploratory and open-ended:

we did not even have an idea of what the film was going to be, except for we are going to travel around the world and see if people were being affected by climate […] we ended up going to 48 countries in search of the human face of climate change.

Eight of these locations appear in the film.² To introduce each successive location, we are shown a map of the globe, with the filmmakers’ next destination marked by concentric red circles towards which the camera slowly zooms, in a manner reminiscent of how earthquake epicentres and conflict ‘hotspots’ are often visualised in the news. While satellite images or maps are used to introduce locations in the first few minutes of almost all the documentaries, Climate Refugees stands out for its repeated use of this mechanism, in a constant zooming-in-and-out that connects all visited locations as instances of a single phenomenon.

This sort of ‘synoptic’ view has been the object of much critique when it comes to representing climate change-related issues more generally. It involves a problematic politics that reduces each place as essentially equivalent to every other, similar instances of the same global-scale phenomenon (Schneider and Walsh 2019), here ‘climate refugees’. This problematic tendency to rely on global perspectives ‘from above’ is repeated in the film’s heavy reliance on expert talking heads, such as politicians, researchers and policymakers mostly working for institutions based in or dominated by the Global North (25 interviewees). In contrast, the supposed climate refugees are represented only by a small number of mostly unnamed local people (7 by my count).

As a result, despite constant talk of impending climate migration, no individual or group is shown on the move in Climate Refugees. Instead, we are shown computer-generated visuals: red arrows that create an impression of massive, direct and unidirectional movement towards Europe and the United States, which appear encircled, beset from all sides.³ The intended message of these arrows was simply that ‘people are going to go to places that have resources, and most of those arrows were pointing to countries or areas that have resources’ (Nash). Nonetheless, they are a crude example of invasion arrows in migration maps (van Houtum and Bueno Lacy 2020). They represent a reductive, deterministic understanding of climate migration, insofar as their size, red colouring, and lack of clear origin create a sense of impending, overwhelming, and uncontrolled mass migration towards the Global North that is disproportionate to what the filmmakers’ can show from their travels. In fact, Climate Refugees has already been critiqued for contributing to a war narrative and apocalyptic imaginary of the future, pitting affected populations as climate change victims, set to become threats to security (Baldwin 2012).

What interests me here, however, is the degree to which the actual practices involved in the filming contribute to these problematic representations. To start, it is significant that filmmakers tend to travel to filming locations by plane. This mode of transport enables a view of the islands from above, which is in turn often interpreted as an image of isolation and vulnerability. This can be a strikingly different perspective to that of the films’ subjects who, down on the ground, may not have much access to such a mode of travel. Describing his arrival in Tuvalu, Michael P. Nash said he felt that ‘in truth, these are nothing but almost shards of land in the middle of the ocean’. This feeling is not unique to him or Climate Refugees. Most of the other filmmakers used images shot from their point of view as they arrived by plane (Shenk, van Gunten, Zubrycki). Recounting the genesis of his film, Jon Shenk remembers being deeply marked by his arrival in the Maldives:

I just remember being on the plane and looking down once we got to the Maldives, and, you know, I don't know if you've ever been to one of these very vulnerable spots in the world, but I will never forget looking down and seeing these gorgeous turquoise islands in the middle of nowhere in the ocean […] my breath was taken away, but also simultaneously, you instantly get that sense of how vulnerable it is. I knew that if we could capture that in some way that we would have an unusual environmental story.

This quote clearly illustrates the power that air travel, and the images of vulnerability and isolation it enables, can have over the imagination. Even filmmakers who do not make use of such images are sensitive to their power. March noted that the absence of a shot from above from her film was in large part due to practical constraints. She travelled to the island by boat because that is the only way of accessing it. She explained, however, that had she arrived by plane instead of by boat, or had access to a drone, as recent productions like Anote’s Ark (2019) do, ‘[she] would probably have done it’, making the same shot from above.

Following protagonists to understand complex trajectories

In sharp contrast to the searching mode, the following mode largely surrenders decisions of where to go (and how) to the films’ main subjects. They, not the filmmakers, are the films’ protagonists. For example, in The Island President, Shenk’s team follows Mohammed Nasheed on his lobbying trips around the world, taking a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ approach (Shenk). In The Hungry Tide, Zubrycki lets Maria’s professional and personal life dictate his movements. Surrendering control in this way leads to a point of view ‘from behind’, over the protagonist’s shoulder. What is interesting about these films is that they tend to focus on the perspective of one person or one constituency. Following a head of state or ex-head of state (as The Island President and Anote’s Ark do) reveals very different sorts of mobility to following an NGO worker (Maria Tiimon in The Hungry Tide), temporary migrant (Semery in Anote’s Ark) or community leader in search of a place to relocate to (Ursula Rekova in Sun Come Up). Depending on who this person is, the mobilities represented on-screen look very different.

When we view films that follow their protagonists, especially in comparison to one another, we see how different mobilities (and perspectives on mobility) can be within one community or group. For example, Mohammed Nasheed is highly mobile. He focuses heavily on international lobbying efforts which take him repeatedly abroad, with little on-screen time spent in the Maldives themselves. In this sense, The Island President casts climate migration more as an issue of international negotiations and policy, rather than a reality to be demonstrated on the ground. Research suggests that following non-elite Maldivians would lead to very different perspectives (Arnall and Kothari 2015). The film ends with COP15, after Nasheed has done what he had set out to do.

In contrast, Maria Tiimon’s movements are more constrained. Her work, based in Australia, takes her abroad only rarely. She cannot easily visit her family in Kiribati. When she does, it is through her family members that we also learn of differences in capabilities and aspirations to move: to migrate abroad, or only within the country, or only temporarily to then return, or not at all. We also learn about the emotional toll this can take. Maria is constantly worried about her parent’s health, of the risk of never seeing them again, of not being able to say goodbye. So, while COP15 also plays a significant role in the film, it is not its end, simply because it is not the end for Maria. Zubrycki decided to:

continue to the following [COP] because the fallout from the very last press conference [in Copenhagen] was such that it impacted on everybody […] people were depressed about the whole thing […] I wanted to get more involved in what's happening on the ground in Kiribati.

Overall, the following mode appears much more likely to capture the experiences and subjectivities of people affected by migration than the searching mode is. It opens the door to more diverse, less western-centric, securitised imaginaries. This is by no means automatic, however. The political implications of following one’s subject are highly dependent on who is followed, offering one situated point of view among many. Further, the following mode still involves a degree of distance, and the final film is influenced by choices made in the editing room. Following cannot achieve the same level of subjective understanding as a documentary directed by (non-)migrants themselves might.

Dwelling in place to access rich and situated entanglements of mobilities

Like the following mode, the dwelling mode prioritises its subjects’ mobilities over the filmmaker’s. The difference is that the films’ focus is on people who are comparatively immobile. For instance, the near totality of There Once was an Island happens on Takuu Atoll. While this choice to remain in one place is in part due to budget constraints and a particularly hard-to-access filming location, it is also because the people featured in the film are not moving from their homes – either because they cannot, do not want to, or both. When two scientists join Briar March on her second trip to Takuu Atoll, they come first and foremost because the islanders have asked for outside expertise. Even though their arrival serves the purpose of the film insofar as it provides new narrative opportunities, the scientists are invited, via the filmmaker, by the community. Their needs are prioritised.

The point of view on the screen is then, borrowing a phrase used by Troon (2020), ‘along the waterline’. In March’s case, this is due to the difficulty accessing Takuu Atoll, which is only reachable by boat. This translates directly to her film. The first shot of her film is half in the water, and we see a Takuu islander in a canoe, sail unfurled. Choosing to shoot from this vantage point was important for March in showing the historical and traditional importance of sea travel to the people of Takuu: ‘they migrated here […] they came on these winds’. Similarly, ThuleTuvalu opens with two parallel scenes of people hunting for seals in Thule, and of fishing on the beach in Tuvalu. As a result, films that adopt a dwelling mode provide particularly rich sense of place and the complex entanglements of mobilities that constitute them. They are much more likely to pay attention to the differences and tensions within communities. By spending time in place, we learn why people react differently to the same circumstances, how age, gender, religious beliefs or other cultural attachments to the sea, land, and certain ways of life influence their decisions to move or stay.

The dwelling approach also points to the inherent dynamism and mobility of our environments, and how these mobilities become intertwined with politics, economics, and other social dynamics. Shored Up, for example, shows this by focusing on the erosion processes which coastal management institutions on the eastern US seaboard seek to counteract. While filming, Ben Kalina ‘realised that the barrier islands are extremely dynamic, […] they’re almost like, constantly in motion’. The sand on which people have built their homes is shifting, and it is because they try to hold it in place that the process of erosion is accelerated. Kalina’s film also demonstrates how uneven access to insurance, financing and political decision-making translate to highly uneven coastal protection schemes that only protect some people and negatively impact others. Discussing the impact of Hurricane Sandy, he points to a process of ‘climate gentrification’. The poorest areas along the coast were also the hardest hit, least supported and where inhabitants were least likely to rebuild after the storm, choosing to move away instead. ThuleTuvalu offers another example of entangled environmental and economic mobilities. For the people of Thule in Greenland, it is the ever-later freezing and earlier melting of winter ice that hampers their movements, limiting the use of sleds, making previously safe passages and hunting grounds unsafe. At the same time, changing patterns of fish migrations are also altering economic opportunities as schools venture north, increasingly near Thule’s coast. Hunters willing and able to do so can abandon their traditional seal and whale hunting grounds to join the fishing industry. Ultimately, the filmmakers who dwell in place offer the most detailed and sensitive accounts of individuals’ decisions to move or stay. Their films demonstrate how the different mobilities of people, natures, and capital, intersect in distinct, context-specific ways. Emphasising the complexities of climate mobilities in this way provides space to challenge apocalyptic imaginaries of climate migration, while still taking the impacts of climate change on peoples’ lives seriously.

The documentaries’ reach, reception and reinterpretation

How widely a film can spread is a function of networks of communication and distribution. The filmmakers all reported that their films were well-received, though not always seen as widely as they would have wished. The few that can be found on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator are favourably reviewed, though by few critics. Most of the films discussed here were funded by TV networks and made for TV. They also toured film festivals, mostly in North America and Europe. Nowadays, films are difficult to access. They need to be requested from the distributors or accessed via specialised, paid-for viewing platforms such as Kanopy. This, and ratings on the Internet Movie Database, suggest small viewerships, with less than 100 reviews for all except, again, The Island President, which gets over 1000 – a modest number still. For comparison, An Inconvenient Truth has over 80 thousand reviews.

Nonetheless, the films can have specific and localised impacts. The Hungry Tide, for example, temporarily raised the media profile of the Pacific Calling Partnership (PCP), the organisation employing Maria Tiimon. Though a direct causal relationship is hard to establish, it seems that as a result, ‘[subsequent] articles have tended to be more detailed and inclusive of the preferred PCP media frames’ (Dreher and Voyer 2015, 72). That is frames emphasising Pacific islanders’ ‘right to exist’ and to choose whether to migrate, over frames presenting them as victims or ‘proof’ of climate change, though those remained common in the Australian press. In contrast, Climate Refugees premiered in Copenhagen during COP15, and viewings were organised in ‘global’ organisations such as the Vatican, US Senate, World Economic Forum and Pentagon. Nash aimed to influence global (North) policymakers and seems to have had some impact in that regard. In academia, however, it is There Once was an Island that has attracted most attention in reviews and articles, sparking debates about the representation of climate change in the Pacific in film (Deloughrey 2017; Kelman 2011; Murray 2015; Wolffram 2012).

In any case, how a film is interpreted depends heavily on who the viewer is. From my vantage point, rooted in a close engagement with climate mobilities scholarship, I have a generally positive perspective on The Hungry Tide and There Once was an Island as recognising islanders’ agency and demonstrating the wide variety of mobilities they choose and demand, particularly seen against the more problematic narratives such as Climate Refugees. In contrast, taking a postcolonial perspective on the same films, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that ‘by bracketing out empire, capitalism, and carbon colonialism, these films trade on a salvage environmentalism that recuperates a historic and nostalgic nature by detemporalising the Pacific Islander, while suppressing the issue of the viewer's complicity’ (2017, 244–245).

Wider cultural factors are also at play in how documentaries are received. Reviewing the same two films, Korauaba, an i-Kiribati journalist, tells us that ‘[they] have both raised the profile of climate change to an outside world but they have done little to raise the awareness of the media in the Pacific’, if only because, in contrast to audiences in the Western world who might watch these films to learn about events elsewhere, ‘in Kiribati, video clippings, DVD, documentaries are called movies and they are for entertainment only’ (2013, 307). Making any generalisations about how different viewers interpret these films is difficult, but it is nonetheless clear that these films can carry ideas about climate migration or mobilities into certain contexts, only to be interpreted completely differently elsewhere. The fact that the same film can be interpreted as a useful representation of entangled mobilities by one viewer; as a problematic case of ‘salvage environmentalism’ by another; and inconsequential entertainment by a third, shows how context-dependent perceived climate mobilities (mis)representations can be.

Conclusion

This article has used an analysis of documentary filmmaking to explore (mis)representations of the complex relationship between climate change and migration and how they contribute to diverse climate imaginaries. I conclude here with a few lessons for climate mobilities scholarship more broadly. Many climate mobilities researchers focus primarily on actual mobilities and peoples’ experiences of them. On this basis, they provide nuanced understandings of the diversity of phenomena covered by the term ‘climate mobilities’ and offer an empirical counterpoint to reductive ideas about climate migration as a linear, permanent and massive international flow of people (Boas 2022; Baldwin, Fröhlich, and Rothe 2019). However, taking (mis)representations as the starting point for analysis provides a different set of insights. Specifically, it helps explain why some simplistic, alarming imaginaries of climate migration so often overshadow the more accurate (but less sensational) accounts of climate mobilities.

Analysing differences in mobilities – that is, contrasting the mobilities of filmmakers’ engaged in representation to those of the people being represented – is fruitful for thinking about power dynamics in practices of representation. Perhaps the most salient point to emerge from the analysis is that whose mobilities are prioritised in the documentary filmmaking process is key to understanding the images produced. Filmmakers who cast themselves as the main protagonist risk ignoring the perspectives and experiences of affected people. In contrast, filmmakers who hand over control of their mobility to their subjects, following them wherever they go, are more likely to access their protagonists’ subjectivities and represent them on screen. The same applies to those who dwell in a place to learn from people who do not move, cannot move, or leave only to return. More broadly, when filmmakers prioritise their own mobilities, they risk closing off alternative imaginaries of the future that might challenge their own. For example, where Climate Refugees casts climate migration as an impending catastrophic event, the films that follow or dwell with their protagonists present it as a far more complex process with context-dependent and contested solutions. This finding highlights the fundamentally political nature of mobilities (cf. Cresswell 2010). Whose mobilities are prioritised matters because they involve different power dynamics and suggest different political solutions. Unless those first affected are prioritised, these solutions risk being counterproductive, potentially even harmful.

This paper also demonstrates the pertinence of investigating the ‘moment of production’ of climate representations, which remains the least studied ‘moment’ of climate communication (O’Neill and Smith 2014). The filmmaker interviews provide important context on how representations of climate (mobilities) are made, context that an exclusive focus on the films themselves as ‘visual text’ might miss. The interviews show how filmic representations of climate change, as Svoboda similarly notes in a review of climate fiction films, ‘reflect filmmakers’ predispositions more than any scientific consensus’ (2016, 43). They show that the ability to present audiences with a novel subject and to personalise the often-abstract complexity of climate change impacts were just as, if not more, important to the interviewed filmmakers. They also show that practical constraints relating to available finances and filming technologies can significantly limit or enable the capacity of the filmmakers to search, follow, or dwell. Whichever approach they take in filming, it can be reinforced, or tempered, during editing and post-production. And once the film is out in the world, it can be (re)interpreted in various ways, serving different purposes in different contexts.

Academic researchers can learn from documentary filmmaking by analogy, especially as they seek to implement mobile methods that imperfectly overlap with the mobilities of their research participants (Boas et al. 2020). Awareness of how different mobilities shape (mis)representations can provide a useful guide to better research, inviting reflection on how constraints and decisions at every stage can affect the outcomes of research, and its potential (re)interpretations. More broadly, attention to representational practices is an opportunity to connect with the broader genealogy of mobilities theory that extends beyond the social sciences and includes insights from the arts and humanities (Merriman and Pearce 2017). This opens avenues for further research, suggesting researchers may have much to learn from not only filmmakers, but also journalists, writers of speculative fiction and the affected populations who themselves can and should play a leading role in representing their own lives.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the filmmakers for taking the time to be interviewed. The paper has benefited from many thorough and thoughtful comments, for which the author thanks an anonymous reviewer, the special issue guest editors, Lane Atmore, Mike Hulme and Noam Obermeister.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by a Cambridge Trust European PhD scholarship .

Notes

1 The directors of Sun Come Up declined for lack of time.

2 The eight locations shown in the film: Fiji, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Tuvalu, United States (New Orleans), China, Chad (Lake Chad), Kenya and Sudan (Author’s notes).

3 The arrows are visible in the film trailer (1:26 min), see: http://www.climaterefugees.com/