By Ogova Ondego
Published November 3, 2015
A film that has been described as ‘A moving portrayal of an individual family and its effort to cope with climate change” and as showcasing “human resilience in the face of uncertainty’, premieres on Aljazeera English on December 2, 2015.
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The documentary, KISILU: THE CLIMATE DIARIES, is set in semi-arid eastern Kenya where Kisilu Musya, a peasant farmer, uses his camera to capture the impact of climate change on his village: forced migration for economic reasons, strained family relationships, floods, droughts and storms.
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“Through seamless intercutting of Kisilu’s video diaries and director Julia Dahl’s footage,” say Al Jazeera’s publicists Kevin Kriedemann and Joy Sapieka, “the film creates a raw and honest portrait of family life in rural Kenya at the frontline of climate change.”
Among the subjects of Kisilu Musya’s is his own family of nine children who have survived off land for years but are now facing harder times due to more extreme weather conditions.
Describing the film as “an inspiring portrait of a man who refuses to give up, who continues to drive long-term change in a community fighting for day-to-day survival,” Kriedemann and Sapieka say Musya who, together with his community received funding from the Government in 2015 with which to set up an irrigation system, shall in December 2015 attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), set to take place in the French capital, Paris, November 30-December 11, 2015. Here, 196 countries shall be expected to sign a new climate change agreement aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and thus avoiding the threat of dangerous climate change like what is depicted in the documentary Musya shot.
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Besides being nominated for the Grierson Award and winning five international awards, an earlier, shorter version of KISILU: THE CLIMATE DIARIES earned director Dahl the One World Media Student Award in 2015.
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This documentary, that shows how climate change is affecting a farming family in Mutomo area of Ukambani, shall premieres on December 2, 2015 at 23h00 EAT on Witness, Al Jazeera’s observational documentary strand, with repeats on December 3, 2015 at 1500; Friday, December 4, 2015 at 0400; and December 5, 2015 at 0900 EAT.
Meanwhile in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, Alliance Francaise and Goethe-Institut are on November 11, 2015 at 6.30pm shall, in a programme dubbed ‘On the Road to Paris Climate 2015’, set the pace by launching a documentary and a music video that seeks to re-frame the complexity of climate change and motivate individual and collective action towards taking measures to mitigate or adapt to climate change.
The documentary CLIMATE: CHANGE THE CONVERSATION, is said to be weaving together extracts from a multi-disciplinary performance using music, theatre, spoken word, multi-media and installation art to raise awareness on climate change with expert interviews and strategies being implemented in Kenya to tackle climate change.
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