Water Town

OPENING NIGHT FILM + PARTY CFI launches the 2018 edition of DocLands with Montreal-based photographer/ethnologist Matthieu Rytz’s exquisitely shot feature, a real-time climate change story. Most often a hard-to-grasp scientific abstraction that seems little evident in day-to-day life, climate change could hardly be more heartbreakingly immediate for the residents of Kiribati, a nation in the central Pacific Ocean. The engaging residents in Rytz’s film guide us through their predicament: Kiribati’s 33 atolls sprawl over an expanse as wide as the U.S., yet barely rise above sea level—and that level is rising. As global warming generated by industrialized countries swallows Kiribati whole, this small, isolated culture is being destroyed. Lovely and mournful, Anote’s Ark chronicles the peculiarities of a population whose all-too-imminent future will be strictly as refugees, their homeland only accessible to divers. Will the Herculean efforts of former President Anote Tong stop this