Bangladeshi story of resilience travels around the globe
DL desk
A Bangladeshi documentary film titled The Lived Experience of Climate Change was recently screened at the United Kingdoms Blue Dot Festival. It is an award-winning multimedia festival combining an impressive line-up of singers and songwriters with a ground-breaking programme of live science experiments, expert talks and immersive artworks. The documentary is directed by Ehsan Kabir, founder of GREEN ink. video productions and is based on the research of Joanne Jordan from the University of Manchester. Jordans research was based on urban climate change resilience in Bangladesh and she has spent months in the slums of Dhaka in order to understand how climate change is linked to peoples everyday lives in the slums and how they are trying to find solutions to the various problems they face. Jordan teamed up with the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Dhaka and Dhaka-based GREEN ink. video productions to communicate her findings to a broad range of audience and create awareness for the climate change related issues the slum-dwellers additionally have to face in their already precarious livelihoods.
The result is a pot gan, a traditional, interactive theatre performance that has been seen by over 600 people in Dhaka, including slum dwellers, policy makers, practitioners, academics, and the general public. Simultaneously, GREEN ink. new media studio produced this 20-minute documentary to bring the stories from the Dhaka slum dwellers to an even larger international audience. The documentary won multiple awards which include Best Public Engagement Award and Making the Differences Award by Global Development Institute (GDI), Manchester, UK. It highlights the conflicts as well as innovative approaches to tackle those conflicts taken by the Mirpur slum dwellers. By now, this production has been watched globally more than 100,000 times, raising awareness and stimulating discussion on the challenges the Mirpur community, and people across Bangladesh, are facing while also revealing the ingeniousness, creativity, courage and innovation capacity of the slum community. The documentary has been screened several times at places like Rich Mix London, Manchester Museum and Independent University, Bangladesh.
Ehsan Kabir, founder of GREEN ink. and director of the documentary The Lived Experience of Climate Change says: We are very proud that this important story which shows how climate change affects people in their daily lives travels across the globe. In times of US president Trump declaring climate change a hoax and a Chinese conspiracy, it is more important than ever to reveal how climate change already affects the disadvantaged people of society in their daily lives while also highlighting that there are ways to help them and that we all have a share in this.
