NO DISTANT FUTURE

Climate change as an existential threat

Katerina Teaiwa

The office of Nei Tabera Ni Kai (NTK), a film unit based in the town of Bairiki, in the small island nation of Kiribati, is a small concrete building situated two metres above sea level, thirty metres from the lagoon on one side and forty-­five metres from the ocean on the other. Stacked under the louvered glass windows of one of its small rooms are 200 internal hard drives taken from computers over a period of twenty years. The office has no air conditioning, and the air is salty; there are regular electricity blackouts; and higher than normal wave surges, or “king tides”, threaten the town – and the whole southern end of the atoll, South Tarawa, on which it is located – more frequently than they used to.

Once a Kiribati household name, NTK has not worked on major projects for a couple of years. One of the co-founders, John Anderson, cameraman and editor, passed away in 2016. His long-­time partner, producer, manager and scriptwriter Linda Uan, has been dealing with

N o D ista nt Future

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