Newtok

Michael Kirby Smith, Andrew Burton, and Marie Meade (2022, U.S., 97 min.) + post-film discussion

Water will erase Newtok, Alaska. Built on a delta at the edge of the Bering Sea, the tiny Yup’ik village has been dealing with melting permafrost, river erosion and decaying infrastructure for decades. To keep their culture and community intact, 360 Yup’ik residents must relocate their entire village to stable ground upriver while facing a federal government that has failed to take appropriate action to combat climate change. In moving their village, they will become some of America’s first climate change refugees. This is a film of a village seeking justice in the face of climate disaster.

Continuing our theme of Mind Over Matter, Newtok portrays both the physical and emotional toll climatic change, and especially flooding, can have on communities. Not only does it physically destroy land, erode housing, and pollute water, but it uproots families and threatens the survival of cultures and histories of knowledge. But Newtok is not an elegy–instead, it shows audiences the resilience and perseverance of a community determined to survive.

Following the film, we featured a discussion with a panel of experts on climate change and cultural resilience. The panelists included:

• Dr. Guangqing Chi; Penn State Professor of Rural Sociology, Demography, and Public Health Sciences
• Mary Ann Smith; Penn State Affiliate Researcher and Lecturer of Biology
• Tracy Peterson; Penn State Director of Student Transitions and Pre-College Programs, Penn State Engineering
• Jake Hohner (Moderator); Public Programming Intern, Penn State Sustainability

You can click here to watch the introduction to the event and post-film conversation.