Beautiful Islands

Beautiful Islands, a new film by Japanese television journalist Kana Tomoko, takes the viewer to three islands with one tragic theme—each place is gradually being consumed by the ocean around them. The film explores the cultures and people of Tuvalu (the South Pacific), Venice (Italy) and Shishmaref  (Alaska) in a style that is rooted in cinema verité. Most of the film is shot and edited in an observational manner—and in that sense it has a lot in common with Thomas Balmes’s earlier 2010 film Babies, which followed the lives of four newborn children as they are raised in Tokyo, San Francisco, Mongolia and Namibia. Unlike Babies, which strictly adhered to the rules of verité and benefited greatly from doing so, Beautiful Islands stumbles a bit by broadening it’s technique outside of the style in ways that are sometimes awkward.

The strength of Beautiful Islands is that is about people as much as it is about geography. Some of this can probably be traced to the influence of producer Hirokazu Koreeda, a veteran narrative director who’s 2008 Still Walking was one of the subtlest and most well crafted family drama’s of the year. Although this is Tomoko’s first feature she has directed numerous environmental programs for NHK in Japan and shows a passion for each of the nationalities in the film. On Tuvalu we meet a family with two young girls who play on the beaches, attend the one room open-walled schoolhouse, and swim in the clear blue oceans. In Venice we encounter a man who has been a gondolier his whole adult life and is determined to pass the craft on to his young sons. In Shishmaref, a family lives by hunting on land and harvesting the fish and creatures of the frozen waters. Her filming technique (with cinematographer Yukio Minami) is simple and quite effective—we join the characters in the worlds that their ancestors have passed down to them. The visual impact of the story comes from the unique beauty that is characteristic of each island - the biting winter world of Alaska, the ancient architectural wonder of Italy, the gentle tropical climate of Tuvalu.

The compelling idea of Beautiful Islands is that it is bringing us into cultures that may be marked for extinction—each of the islands, and the inhabitants who live on them, are facing the complete loss of their environments. In scenes of daily life with little or no commentary, the film examines reality that is often colorful and sometimes harsh. In Tuvalu, five young men prepare for a community celebration by riding across the small island in a pickup, stopping at homes to select large pigs for slaughter. The film does not shy from showing the process—in an eye-turning sequence that never-the-less shows life as it exists in the community—the men capture an animal, hold it above the ground, wait for the camera to find it’s best angle, then cut it’s throat. In Shishmaref the ritual is echoed in a seal hunt that has been part of the native culture for thousands of years—except now it is done with high-powered rifles. In Venice we experience the canals, piazza’s and grand hotels that embody the high-culture of the romantic city.

The common threat to each island culture—the rising tides—is made clear in numerous ways. The warming permafrost of the Alaskan island weakens the shoreline and archival footage shows houses precariously tipping into the sea. The island is literally washing away and the temperature has changed so much that the son of one family—a veteran hunter—lost his life falling through the precarious ice. The Islands of Tuvalu, many of them strips of land that seem more like a road with some riverbank on either side, are so vulnerable that a small rise in the tide can connect either side of the ocean. In Venice the rising waters flood the piazzas, fill the floors of restaurants, and create scenes such as hotel administrators standing in a foot and a half of water while typing out reservations on computers.

The film’s lack of precise and scientific information is sometimes a distraction, especially when the story moves away from the observational and “opens up” with interviews and titles. It is not necessary for every film about climate change to be as intellectually dense as The Inconvenient Truth—but the ideas and information used to support the thesis of a documentary should be substantial and carefully crafted. The interviews in the film are confined to the residents and natives of each island—which gives the film a sense of authenticity. But a little bit of the traditional technique of using “experts” to inform and frame a story would have been helpful. More confusing is the use of chapter and information titles—poetic in purpose, they lack punctuation and sometimes read like incomplete translations. We learn, for instance, that “some scientists” believe Tuvalu will be the first island nation to sink. And we never learn any timetable for the fate of Venice or get a sense of the geographical size of Shishmaref.

Despite some flaws Beautiful Islands succeeds in transporting us into the lives of people who’s culture and homes are at the forefront of the climate change crisis. It is a film about people who are struggling to understand why and how their lives are being transformed and is told with compassion and respect.  Beautiful Islands is a series of calm and peaceful moments at the center of a worldwide problem that wont go away.

                                    Thomas W. Campbell