Life in an Abandoned Mexican Town Foreshadows a World of Rising Waters
It’s a lot easier to picture the chaos of climate change when it’s already happened. Humans have never witnessed the kind of sea level rise that’s in store for us if we don’t start removing carbon from the atmosphere. We’ve seen massive storms, but we haven’t seen the frequency and intensity that is coming our way. Making clear the scientifically known but so-far unexperienced future is a vital step in grappling with what to do about it.
Short of a time machine, we should start by watching Los reyes del pueblo que no existe (Kings of Nowhere), a surreal new documentary from young Mexican filmmaker Betzabé GarcÃa. She spent five years living in a small town in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, which, in 2009, suffered a cataclysmic inundation from the construction of the nearby Picachos Dam. We don’t see the dam in the film, or the political fight it ignited. Instead, GarcÃa sits the viewer down among the holdouts, the three families who insisted on staying even after the water lapped up most of the settlement. The scenario sounds impossible, but it’s real, and the choices made by the villagers there offer stirring guidance on how to live when rising waters permanently submerge your home.