The brutal impact of climate change drives Bay Area filmmaker Natalie Zimmerman's intense documentary. Focused on the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati, the film weaves breathtaking natural footage with the struggles of people navigating an environment that is slipping away.
The brutal impact of climate change drives this beautiful, intense documentary from Bay Area filmmaker Natalie Zimmerman. As sea levels rise, the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati faces predictions that it will be uninhabitable by 2030. Oceania weaves breathtaking natural footage with the struggles of people navigating an environment that is slipping away. Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio executive produced this urgent film that takes the devastating measure of change on the island over eight years. We follow along as the population wrestles with indisputable scientific data and struggles with the emotional dimensions of this fast-moving emergency. As the story unfolds, we learn more about the fragmented histories and disparate experiences of the people affected by the calamity. Highlighting the overwhelming truths all around, the film asks serious questions and ponders realistic calls to action as a community struggles to stay afloat.
Iris (Isabelle Huppert) is a woman abroad in Seoul, teaching French and English in an idiosyncratic fashion. Linguistic collisions are Hong’s stock in trade and the revelations that unfold over conversations in artificially constructed circumstances are a delight to behold.
Isabelle Huppert is Iris, a woman abroad in Seoul, teaching French and English in an idiosyncratic fashion that allows her to pursue her own philosophical and personal interests. Through four encounters over a single day, Iris probes students and strangers for information about poetry, their own histories, and their relationship to their egos. Director Hong Sang-Soo’s delight in repetition is in play as Iris’s pedagogical catechism takes almost the same form in the first two sequences but deepens when she takes her tutelage outdoors with a married couple and visits a younger man with whom she shares an apartment. Huppert, in her third collaboration with Hong, is puckish and sprightly as the open-eyed and questioning Iris, supported by an impeccable group of performers whom her character knocks up against. Linguistic collisions are Hong’s stock in trade and the revelations that happen here as people converse in artificially constructed circumstances are a delight to behold.
