Dir:Jon Shenk
Year: 2011
Dur: Documentary, 101 Minutes
USA

“If we can’t stop the seas rising, if you allow for a two degree rise in temperature, you are actually agreeing to kill us.” – President Mohamed Nasheed

Winner of the coveted People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival 2011, The Island President is the astonishing story of the first year in office of President Mohammed Nasheed of the Maldives, a dedicated man (and former political prisoner under the Maldives’ previous, repressive regime) confronting a problem greater in its way than any other world leader has ever faced – the impending submersion of his country, and everyone in it, beneath the ocean’s surface. Considered the lowest lying country in the world, a rise of a mere three feet in sea level would inundate the Maldives, rendering the fantastically beautiful country – a virtual Shangri-la of turquoise reefs, beaches and cities composed of 1,200 coral islands arrayed across 400 miles of open sea – completely uninhabitable. Unfortunately, the sea has already begun creeping upward.

You might also like:

• Silent Snow
• Bitter Seeds
• The Weather Gods

Dir: Rehad Desai
Year: 2011
Dur: Documentary, 32 Minutes
South Africa

“Climate change is destroying Africa. In the harshest of ironies, the cradle of mankind could well become its grave...” – Dianne McAlpine Special Projects Coordinator for Greenpeace Africa

Global temperatures are rising. Nowhere is this being felt more intensely than on the African continent. Unless a legally binding international agreement to reduce carbon emissions is put in place very soon, temperatures will soar. And Africa will be set to burn. Already we see the effects of global warming as drought, floods and famine stalk our land with an increasing intensity. African farmers are battling adversities unseen in living memory. This hard- hitting documentary brings the true face of the problem to light, telling the story of the people in the front line of climate change: rural communities in Mali and Kenya and South Africa.

You might also like:

• The Island President
• Silent Snow
• Bitter Seeds

Dir: Jan Van Den Berg
Year: 2011
Dur: Documentary, 71 Minutes
Netherlands

“An Inuit searching for solutions to the poisoning of the arctic...”

The Arctic plains are an eminent example of nature’s untouched beauty, an endless nothing in which only few know how to survive. But dangerous pesticides are silently accumulating here, poisoning its inhabitants - a disturbing preview of the consequences of structural pollution of the environmental system worldwide. Silent Snow follows a young Greenlandic woman (Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann) on her journey all around the world to find the local causes of the contamination that is quietly poisoning her people. On three different continents (Africa, Asia and South America) she meets the people behind the sources of pollution and discovers the heartbreaking dilemmas that lie at the heart of it.

Best film - Ecozine Zaragoza
First Prize - Green Festival Seoul
First Prize - Planet in Focus, Toronto
Best International Film - HRAFF Australia
Prix du meilleur court métrage - FIFFEL, Lausanne
Children Earth Vision Award - Japan
Golden Snail - Slow Food on Film Festival Bologna
Honorable Mentions - INKAFEST Peru; HR Film Fest. Buenos Aires
Stop Global Warming Award and J-Wave Audience Award
Short Shorts Film Festival In Japan

You might also like:

• Island President
• Weather Gods
• Bitter Seeds