CONVERSATIONS WITH COAL MINERS (ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE) 2022
Coal miners and climate activists regularly face off in heated and sometimes violent confrontations in the coal mining towns of Australia’s Queensland. On one hand, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, and on the other, it’s becoming a social pariah in a world going more green. Filmmaker and Environmental activist Kim Nguyen goes deep within Australia’s coal country to meet miners trying to preserve coal towns, aboriginal activists trying to stop the Adani Carmichael coal mining project, and a horseman infamous for assaulting climate protestors. All to ask- how do you get coal miners to give up that one thing their livelihood depends on?
Co-directed by Chris Phillips and Kim Nguyen. Initial funding from a Walkley Foundation grant, produced for Vice media.
Finalist in the 2022 Rory Peck Awards
JUDGES’S COMMENTS: RORY PECK AWARDS
“What he achieves what came achieves in this film is something that we don't normally see, it's not the same old tropes and the same old way of approaching the climate message. These kinds of films are extremely rare.
– JESS SEARCH, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, DOC SOCIETY
“A brilliant illustration of taking controversial topics and making people find common ground and learn from it.”
– PETER MURIMI, EMMY AWARD WINNING DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR & PRODUCER
PRODUCTION STILLS
RELATED WORK
The BBC World Service project Life At 50°C found that the number of extremely hot days every year, when the temperature reaches 50 degrees centigrade, has doubled since the 1980s. This returning series tells the stories of people on the frontline of climate change, sometimes made worse by conflict or pollution. Combining character-led stories, visual extremes and journalistic investigation, recent films were from South Sudan, Syria and Colombia. This new feature-length documentary is set in the coal country of Queensland, where life at 50°C is now a reality, but the economy is fuelled by coal mining. It’s an intimate portrait of lives inextricably linked to a new mine.
Although tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into swift lethal exchanges which threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture.
Bootlegged copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use
of such weaponry. The influence of the film was so pronounced that the term Rambo is now used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. The services of Rambos were suddenly in high demand as a variety of M16s and Indonesian military weaponry found its way down the Sepik River through swap-laden smuggling routes.
“This is Reality” is an abstract exploration into the lasting impact of conflict, set in the independent nation of East Timor. East Timor endured a brutal 24-year Indonesian occupation from 1975-1999 in which around 200,000 people were killed or disappeared.
Few carry these scars more distinctively than Osme Gonsalves, a celebrated artist, singer, poet, actor, and prominent ex-resistance fighter, who struggles to find peace despite the goal of sovereignty being reached. Frustrated by his nation’s perceived apathy, Osme creates a fake reality television show to travel the districts and interview the population about the contemporary reality of their lives.