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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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The Hungry Tide (Film)

by Cara Nash | December 07, 2011 12:13 | Edited December 07, 2011 12:19

By putting a human face to the complex and often divisive issue of climate change, the level of urgency and heartbreak surrounding the matter comes into clear focus.

Whereas Al Gore spelt out with terrifying candour the imminent and devastating danger of global warming in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, here the topic of environmental calamity is tackled via a different approach: by putting a human face to the issue. But the message in Tom Zubrycki's A Hungry Tide is just as urgent. The veteran documentarian (whose previous works include Temple of Dreams and Molly & Mobarak) zeroes in on the lives of the people living in Kiribati, the globe's lowest-lying nation. Each year the water rises and we're shown the villages of people desperately trying to keep the "hungry tide" from washing their homes away...

 

The island's story is told through the eyes of Maria Tiimon, a Kiribati woman who has made the tough decision to move away from her family and make a living (she regularly sends money back home) in Sydney. Maria works for an organisation dedicated to raising the world's awareness of the climate change predicament rocking her home country. We watch as she takes her country's message to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, but the irony is that while the initially shy Maria grows more confident in her advocacy work, she also grows less optimistic about the help she will gain from the world's leaders. Following the Conference, a $30 billion fund was pledged to help countries like Kiribati take protective action, but at the time of filming, the money never came through.

 

With his camera capturing graphic images of the tide breaking through sea walls, flooding homes and destroying plantations that provide an income for many of the families, Zubrycki clearly shows why this aid is so urgently required. But the film also raises some tough questions. In the short term, Kiribati could protect itself with better sea defences, but in the long term, it seems inevitable that the sea level will continue to rise until the land becomes uninhabitable. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when. So then the heartbreaking line of questioning becomes: How much do you spend on fixing something that's unfixable? When do you give up and walk away? And what will be lost in the process - the culture and identity of these people?

 

Occasionally, this is slow paced stuff (which reflects the often tedious nature of trying to get anything done about the issue), but like Maria's quiet but fierce determination, A Hungry Tide emerges as quietly compelling viewing. And it scores a handful of truly touching moments, one of which comes toward the end when a resident school teacher talks pragmatically about having to relocate. He says that he hopes such countries as Australia and New Zealand will show mercy towards his people when the time arrives. It's clear that we're battling the elements, but we'll also soon be tasked with finding homes for the Kiribati people and others in similar situations. Here's hoping we can rise to meet both challenges.