Community Based resilience, strategies & prepping!
Interview with Phie Ambo and Sofie Falther (Denmark), from the project Fire, Water, Earth, Air
We sat down with filmmaker and director Phie Ambo and her producer Sofie Falther to talk about their film project “Fire, Water, Earth, Air” which is a poetic portrait of climate change in the Global North, weaving together four stories of everyday life in small communities in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Faroe Islands and scientific findings to show how we live with the unprecedented environmental changes and prepare for them.
Sometimes, Climate storytelling is the most effective when the climate theme is something subtle or invisible and not in your face judgemental or educational. When it is just a story and then the climate theme is layered behind or inside the story.
Climate storytelling can also be happening behind the screen, in how we produce, choices we make and how we work materially.
“We have found that this aspect is not only conceptual and concretely material as in reducing the C02 footprint, but it actually affects the storytelling in that it helps with representation and thus mediation. “
The project is taking shape through collaboration with a research project. We are conducting a lot of workshops on climate change resilience in the North. So the film is science based about the different elements.
The story and project takes place in four countries simultaneously, and is conceptual because we use four productionsteams, but with a four-headed director and under a joint visual concept so in the end it will be edited into one film.
It really helps that each team is local and doesn't get swept away by postcard scenic big landscapes or romanticizing the beauty of the Nordic temperament, but are able to go deeper underneath such aspects that could have distracted outsiders. Each local director is connected and embedded in the context and thus has benefits that would be impossible for an outsider to obtain.
As a junior producer at Tambo Film, Sofie Falther has assisted with the production and post-production of titles such as The Last Human (2022), Silent Sun of Russia (2023), and The Lost Notebook (2024). With a background in literature studies focusing on environmental humanities, she is invested in promoting stories that challenge the status quo, and developing sustainable impact strategies while working towards greener production methods and concepts.
Phie Ambo (born 1973) was trained at the National Film School of Denmark, graduating as a documentary film director in 2003. Famous for her feature length documentary films true to the tradition of poetic, personal and cinematic language, Ambo deals with essential topics such as humans/robot relation and the relation between humans and nature. Phie Ambo has directed a number of award-winning films for the cinema, including major works such as Family (2001), Gambler (2005) Mechanical Love (2007) and Free the Mind (2012) and Good Things Await (2014), Rediscovery (2019), 70/30 (2021) and Organized Wilderness (2022). Phie Ambo is a member of The Academy for the documentary branch. She founded the production company Danish Documentary with Sigrid Dyekjær, Pernille Rose Grønkjær and Mikala Krogh in 2009 but now has her own company. She is one of the founders of The Green Free School in Copenhagen, chair of the board from 2014-2021
So we are learning to work in teams and become more collaborative. Figuring out ways to make films that are global stories, engaging with different places in the world, with local teams is something we will continue. And this is also about realizing the privilege we have here, for example the freedom of speech, that enables us to create films here that perhaps cannot be done in other places. So this is about pooling different privileges and trying to accomplish positive impacts that go beyond just the making of films.
It is a different time to be a storyteller, and there is so much we can do that we haven't tried yet, so many nuances of green transitioning. It is not simple, so we need to be brave enough to look at the whole spectrum of stories!
In the transition, narratives are so important. It is important to show positive ways of dealing with a crisis situation and not just create dystopian stories. We have so many of those and there’ll be more of them. But it’s a very comfortable place to sit in, as a director, to make a dystopian story, because we know them and we know people are getting hooked on it. But are they really carrying us into something that can rebuild a society? I doubt it.
Conversely, a lot of broadcasters and financiers means that climate stories don't sell, and they are scared that stories might be too dystopian, or too scientific. We try to challenge that but it can be hard to convey the message to the audience in a ‘good way’ and still be true to the science.
The public service broadcasters mismanaging is problematic in Denmark, they are paid by the citizens to take care of the citizens, to tell them important news, whether they like it or not. That’s what they do about war, and every other aspect, but not with the climate situation. They say that this is too abstract and people don’t want to hear about it, and that is failing their responsibility. And that is part of the explanation to how little people know in Denmark which is a big democratic problem and a generational failure of 30 years lost where we could have acted differently.
And to nuance that a bit, about how people know or not knowing what they don’t know, take the example of “the big bake-off”, a tv-show that is immensely popular in Denmark. They use non-organic dairy and animal products, and it is set in a big tent in a park that is completely dead with no biodiversity whatsoever. This is something all danes watch, and it creates a baseline for their way of experiencing reality. This is what reality looks like. It is a normalizing process of unsustainable existence.
“-That is normalizing a very damaging way of being in the world.”
And it doesn’t matter how many graphs of sea-level rising you are shown in the news when 2 seconds later, the person you identify with in a drama does something that goes against that knowledge.
So storytelling is also about the choices that characters make in the film.. like are they driving? What food are they eating? Those subtle framings of reality are important: how to put climate angels on all stories. Just to start somewhere with something!
It is no wonder people get confused, the whole city is plastered, filled with commercials for flying, filled with meat and dairy. Filled with a lot of reasons why we’re in this situation to start with. We are trapped in it with no chance of escaping it. In the film Industry the financing system is set up and created for us to travel the globe constantly in the industry. both for meetings, but also regarding distribution, holding Q&As and workshops etcetera.
“Everything in the system is pulling you into being a citizen in this fossil dependent community. It leaves us as storytellers with a big responsibility.”
We have to make every mass media product aligned with reality. It is all about these supplementary signals. We know all about propaganda and how it works, and still we call it freedom of choice? it is all about the angels of things…
Take the farmers in Europe blocking roads, the narrative would be quite different if they were climate activists. Then it would have been terrorism and not understandable discontent. There are people though playing with reversing the narratives like for example stop big oil and yellow dot studios on instagram. Here News anchors explain climate activism factually and calmly in a different framing and creates another reality. We as filmmakers could be better and use what’s in the toolbox.
The time frames between making films and direct activism is very different, but it would be interesting to see more collaborations and experiment on how to narrow the gap between activists and storytellers. We have a climate choir where we sing in front of fossil fuel investors and tag them in films on linkedin for example. This is also about doing things that make us feel good and laugh, smile and build community while doing something. Because that is also important.
We are not trying to make a scary catastrophic film, but a film that teaches us how to be in a catastrophic time and situation. How do we cope with this situation? We need to dance with it instead of fleeing it. A beautiful conclusion, as it turns out, is that the best tools we have are probably not technical solutions, but actually, strong communities.
We hope that the film will end up being an invitation to the audience to participate in the green transition, not be scared but instead encouraged to engage and act.
The film:
FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR is a multi-plot story, exploring climate change resilience in small communities of the North, told by four local teams of filmmakers - Rogvi Rasmussen (Storms in the Faroe Islands), Ewa Cederstam (Wildfires in Sweden), Janne Lindgren (Mudslides in Norway) - who, in close collaboration with the Danish director and initiator of the project Phie Ambo (Sea level rising in Denmark), create one coherent film from the unique stories of their lands. Working with local teams to bring their first-hand knowledge to the project, minimizes the film's carbon footprint, heavily reducing transportation while ensuring a richer representation of the diverse climates, cultures, and languages in that specific region. This model adds authenticity and nuance that surpasses what one director could achieve by traveling the world and directing the film alone.