Dirty Power: Burnt Country

I made this film for Greenpeace Australia Pacific in May 2020, with the amazing Chris Phillips.

Much like Dirty Power in 2019, we wanted to expose the very close ties between the coal industry, the Coalition and the Murdoch Media, that maintain inaction on climate change in Australia, and therefore contributed to the bushfire disaster of 2019-20.

Most of the information in the film was already on the public record, so my task was mainly pulling it together into a coherent narrative, while Chris was responsible for most of the visuals.

I was able to interview Emily Townsend, a former News Corp staffer, who shares her experiences of News Corp's climate denialism from the inside. And Professor Joo-Cheong Tham, who describes Australia's dysfunctional political donations oversight allowing hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations to remain untraceable.

Our hope is that this film will help move Australia towards greater climate action, to avoid bushfire catastrophes becoming the norm.

Cheers, Kim

Turtles, Mantas and Sharks

This is some footage I shot (with a great deal of help from the wonderful Ben Stiel) in Indonesia in January this year. Of course it feels like a few lifetimes ago now.

We shot it in Komodo National Park, well, underwater there, just off the Eastern tip of Flores.

Ben and I had never been diving before, but we did our beginners' course in Bali, then our advanced course in Flores, before diving for 3 days straight off a dive boat, that allowed us to find all the life you see in the video. Unfortunately the last day of the trip I fell on the boat and broke my shoulder blade, but luckily Ben picked up the camera and continued filming underwater the rest of the day.

I hope you like the footage, it was one of the most magical experiences of my life filming it. Finally, I had been filming the Great Barrier Reef in December 2019, a month beforehand, and we hadn't found anything like what I found in Indonesia. In fact what I saw of the Great Barrier Reef was scary, as it was so damaged and degraded. The reef has been devastated both by extreme weather (e.g. Cyclone Debbie) and bleaching events (at least the sections near Airlie Beach that I saw). Increasing intensity of extreme weather events and increasing temperatures that lead to bleaching are both caused by climate change (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/c..., https://www.marineconservation.org.au...).

If we want to protect the kind of life that you can see in this video, we have to stop polluting our air and oceans, we need to use renewable energy and put life on our planet before profit.

Chris in Ghana

So this short profile piece was commissioned by the NCD Alliance (NCD means non-communicable disease - things like diabetes, obesity, cancer, things you can't pass on), in late 2019.

It was the first time I'd ever been to Ghana, I mean I don't know Africa well, I'd been to Nigeria for a couple of days in 2017 to make a previous similar piece for the NCD Alliance, and other just been to Morocco for one day. (That day/night in Tangiers was amazing mind you, I'd tried to go back in 2017 with Filmmakers Without Borders, but the paperwork hadn't gone through in time, that's actually how I ended up in Bhutan).

Anyway, I digress a lot. I met Chris, and another guy named Labram, and both of these guys were amazing, as you can tell in Chris' case by watching the vid.

What a guy, such energy, passion, charisma. I'm a big fan of Chris. He has an amazing voice right. He doesn't go into it in the film, but he previously worked in radio and when I was there he was trying to get back in.

I hope he manages it, I hope to stay in touch with him and to see him again. The way he was living, in that one concrete room in the dark, him and his mum squeezed in there. It's the roughest living conditions of anyone I've met to be honest.

Keep up the good work Chris, you're a star.