MELT, THE MOVIE -- BEING CREATED.
By Sara Golling
Three high school boys from Vancouver are making a movie. Correction: three young men who have graduated. They’ve been allowed to graduate early to work on this project, and they’re busy raising funds for the work. The introduction video (above) tells a bit about why they’re doing it. It’s an ambitious and exciting idea; I’m looking forward to seeing the 90-minute finished product.
I asked some questions, and in his reponse Ethan Volberg, one of the young men involved, explained, “we want to shatter a few ideas” that too many people still have. They hope to do that by providing “shocking visual and emotional stories” about the effects of climate change in BC, because those effects can easily be ignored by “people who aren’t looking” — especially in BC, where we generally have clean air and clean water and are surrounded by beautiful landscapes.
They want the movie to let people see what is happening, because “people believe what they can see.” They hope to give average citizens a better level of understanding, based on what is happening right here in BC.
Ice melt in Greenland and the Arctic has been in the news, but those places are far away, so residents of BC may not feel that we are affected by events there; we can write it off as someone else’s problem. We may not consider the immediate effects of glacier death, or the longer-term effects. We may not think about how our precious wild salmon runs will fare with glaciers diminishing or vanishing. Ethan pointed out, “Many experts on the subject of warming rivers and salmon, such as Tony Farrell, are trying their best to sound the alarms, and it could be surprisingly soon that warm rivers start to devastate (salmon) populations.”
The team hopes to capture footage of the Klinaklini Glacier, the largest glacier in BC and one of two major southern coastal glaciers whose rivers flow into the head of Knight Inlet. The southern end of that inlet opens into the Broughton Archipelago, a beautiful area of islands between the north end of Vancouver Island and the mainland.
The film will feature scientists and their work, and is intended to make us aware at both the visceral/emotional and intellectual levels. It’s intended to inspire change — in us.
