Lowland Kids
A tight-knit family faces up to being America's first climate change refugees.
Amid many beautiful scenes, there are two stand-out moments in Sandra Winther’s Lowland Kids (2019).
The first is a pair of satellite maps of Isle de Jean Charles, off the Louisiana coast, where the film is set. The amount of land lost between the first picture, taken in 1963, and the second, in 2018, is jaw-dropping.
This is the climate emergency – clear, undeniable, and terrifying. It’s also ‘show don’t tell’ in its purest form.
The other moment features Chris Brunet and his niece Juliette discussing his new coffee percolator. Chris sings its praises until Juliette wades in with some good-natured piss-taking.
Knowing he’s been rumbled showing off, Chris gives a wry look to the camera. It’s a joyous scene, suffused with the warmth and familiarity of a strong family unit.
Herein lies the brilliance of Sandra’s film. This is a story about climate change – Isle de Jean Charles is being evacuated, and its residents relocated to a new site on the mainland. They are America’s first climate refugees.
But Lowland Kids anchors the huge – and sometimes incomprehensible – climate issue in a very relatable story. It’s about how people are shaped by the places they come from, and the complexities of these connections being broken.
And it captures that climate refugees aren’t only that. They’re three dimensional characters, with histories, and hopes, and plans, that don’t disappear when disaster strikes.
I spoke with Sandra over Zoom from her home in New York. You can see more of her work on her website and her feature doc exploring the same story is due on the festival circuit next year.
Why did you want to tell this story?
William Crouse, one of the producers, came to me and told me there’s this island, where Beasts of the Southern Wild was shot, and the community is being relocated.
I looked into it and immediately I knew this is an important story.
I was interested to meet some of the characters I read about, but I wasn't that drawn to anyone specifically. And I really enjoy working with the youth.
I think there's something really interesting that's happening in those years when you're becoming the person that you want to be, and you're so open and vulnerable. So my initial thought was, are there any young people living here?
I felt like for a young person to grow up in this place, have your childhood in this place, and have that taken away, that's got to be heartbreaking.
We met the family, and Chris was so welcoming. But I remember that first interview with him feeling, oh, I wish I could feel the emotion here more.
He was responding to the camera with the same answers he had given to New York Times journalists. I was looking for something different.
Of course, I wanted to understand the context of their experience, but I was searching for something that I emotionally connected with.
As I was interviewing Chris, Juliette came walking down the stairs. She had this little sassy walk and she was standing next to us texting.
Out of the corner of my eye, I was like, I really want to talk to her. And so we did the interview with Chris, and then I met Juliette and Howard.
I didn't film with them for the first three days. We really just kept coming back to the house and hanging out.
I don't think at the time I knew what I was looking for. I just knew there was something about the sibling relationship, this coming-of-age narrative.
Eventually we were at the house and they were playing football and I asked, can we film this? It opened up from there, and I let them tell me their story.
I met a lot of other families. But after that first trip in January, when we came back, we edited a trailer to see when the film worked best. It became so clear, to me at least, that the story should just be about them.
What were the biggest challenges?
Building trust took a while. It's about creating a warm space so that people can feel seen, and can be themselves. I think that's a challenge for every documentary filmmaker.
This was my first independent documentary project, where no-one was telling me what I needed to do, what kind of film they were expecting from me. It was just me.
And I didn't have any reference point – I was learning to be a filmmaker. I had directed things before, but certainly not in this way, and I hadn't been given someone's personal story where we could go so deep.
I knew that we were making something that felt kind of good. But we submitted it to Sundance and we didn't get in. I had a deep fear – maybe there won’t be this screening that I'll be able to take this family to. Maybe I wasn't ready. Maybe I should have filmed things differently.
We didn't know how to get it out there and what to do with it. We brought on Lauren Avinoam, another producer who definitely gave me more confidence, and then we got into SXSW and had our premiere, and it just opened up.
I feel like that’s the biggest challenge for most people that make their first short film, narrative or documentary. How do I make sure it actually gets out there? How do I make sure it's seen?
What would you do differently if you made it again?
I watch some of that footage and I'm like, Sandra, you're talking too much. You want to disappear into the background so that the subjects forget that you're there.
Of course you’re always nudging the story in the direction that you need. But I guess looking back, there could have been moments where I should have just let it be, and just listened.
Also, I would have documented the place even more. The shore is a time capsule of a place that's sinking, and it looks so different now. Many more trees are dead; two thirds of the homes were destroyed in Hurricane Ida.
We filmed a lot of B-roll, but I should have done even more. That’s definitely something I'll take with me if I ever do another film that's so much about a place – to spend an entire day just filming that flower, that tree, that house, that detail.
What are you most proud of?
I’m incredibly proud that this film has been used for educational materials.
It's been translated into so many different languages, shown in schools across the world. Climate activists reference it.
I've had, I don't know how many film students reach out to me saying, "I want to make a film about my community. We're also experiencing land loss. How did you do it?”
That makes me really proud, because I feel like it's actually ignited something. It's started a conversation.
How do we represent these communities? How do we tell these stories? How do we do it in a way that feels very eye level?
There could be criticism that we need more context, that we need to understand what's causing these rising sea levels and hurricanes to grow stronger every year. And we’re doing that in the feature much more.
But what was so cool is that it resonated with people on both sides of the aisle. And people respond to it because you get to be with the characters.
I'm not trying to educate you, and tell you – this is what you’re doing wrong and this is what you need to be doing differently.
I love those films, I really do. And those films need to be made. This is just not that.
How did making this film change you?
It made me feel that I have a much larger purpose in filmmaking than I thought I could have. I feel that there's a space for me in this industry to tell stories in a way that's uniquely mine.
It felt very intimidating before this project to do that. And the way that the team has grown since the short is just incredible and I feel very lucky to have such support.
Darren Aronofsky is an EP on the feature-length version and I have some of the best documentary producers around me. So the film changed my professional career.
It's also changed me as a person. It's made me feel that I really have something to offer, and something to give.
I've written a narrative feature with two of my friends that takes place in Puerto Rico. It also deals with two siblings and takes place amidst Hurricane Maria.
I would have never been able to write that film if I hadn't spent so much time with Howard and Juliette and Chris in this place.
So it's changed everything. It made me feel that I can be a storyteller, and I can make things of importance.
And if I tell someone that their story is going to be heard, that it will be, because it's not just going to drown somewhere on the internet. I will make sure that it gets seen.
This is the first time I’ve interviewed a director who is working on a feature length version of the same story we’re discussing. Sandra is still surrounded by this story and these characters.
It would be fascinating to talk to her in a few years’ time, after the feature has done its thing, and see how, if at all, she’s been able to move on.
As mentioned last week this newsletter is going to be sent every two weeks over the summer, so see you in around 14 days.