“Making a Good Movie Has to Come from the Heart, Not from a Mental Understanding of an Issue”: Matthieu Rytz on Anote’s Ark

Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Matthieu Rytz’s Anote’s Ark follows the international, one-man crusade of Anote Tong, president of Kiribati. That island republic is situated smack in the middle of the Pacific with an indigenous population — exemplified here by Sermary, a young mother of six forced to choose between family and a future in New Zealand — poised to lose their 4,000 year-old way of life as climate change will soon cause the entire country to disappear into the ocean. As the title implies, Tong is less concerned with saving Kiribati itself — he’s painfully aware it’s too late for such fanciful idealism — than in a mass relocation of its citizens to a new shared homeland. That, and in sounding the alarm that Kiribati is merely the canary in a global coalmine.

Filmmaker spoke with the Swiss director, who trained as a visual anthropologist before turning to photography and documentary work, prior to the doc’s NYC premiere at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival (June 15th at the IFC Center, June 18th at the Film Society of Lincoln Center).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.