BGHS

The Film Project

The documentary with the working title "Nanook geht baden" ("Nanook goes swimming" for arte/ZDF) focuses on climate-related perceptions and behaviours in two geographical areas that are most harshly affected by climate change. The film team accompanies two young ClimateWorlds researchers, the ethnologists Jelena Adeli and Claudia Grill, during a stage of their field research in Cape Verde/West Africa and on the edge of the Canadian Arctic. Both want to know how the increase of such phenomena as devastating storms, droughts or melting ice are perceived by the local populations and how local people interpret these phenomena. Perhaps as a divine punishment? Or - like in many places of the "western" world - as the kind of wild weather fluctuation that "has always happened"?

Claudia´s and Jelena´s research method is participant observation. Their research subjects are fishermen, farm-workers, hunters and trappers. Similar to the two young scientists, the film team also aims at sharing - if only for a short while - these local people's everyday activities. A light can thus be thrown - albeit a passing one - not only on the field research work of two ethnologists, but also on the way African farmers and fishermen face the increasingly devastating drought. We also get to know subarctic hunters and trappers that interpret the melting ice neither as man-made nor as a threat. But only 300km farther north, together with Claudia Grill we meet Inuit who see these matters in a rather different light...