Ice to Islands:
How Do You Say Goodbye to Your Homeland?

Ice to Islands is the first film to follow the stories of Greenlandic and Maldivian folks who have to leave their homes because of climate change. The film features Greenlandic researcher Lene K Holm, an Arctic boat captain named Silver, a Maldivian climatologist, and a Maldivian woman who plans to move her family to escape rising seas.

Drew Denny began shooting Ice to Islands while aboard the Chasing the Light expedition to northwest Greenland in 2012. Denny had recently scattered her father’s ashes across the American southwest and, as she documented Zaria Forman scattering her mother’s ashes in the Arctic, she began to wonder: What are the funereal rituals for disappearing landscapes? How do we say goodbye to the ice? How do we say goodbye to the islands? In the Maldives, the 2004 tsunami catalyzed a radical shift in political and religious practice. As Denny documented the highly controversial 2013 presidential election, new questions arose: How do we live in a place that’s disappearing? How do we maintain human rights amidst great fear? Denny, Forman and Lebofsky hope to return to both Greenland and the Maldives to follow up with those who so generously shared their stories in this film.

Co-Founded by pastel artist Zaria Forman and painter Lisa Lebofsky, Ice to Islands is a multi-media environmental activist project that includes a feature length documentary film, a series of large scale pastel drawings, a series of paintings on aluminum panels, publications, lectures, screenings and exhibitions of visual, sound, installation and performance artworks.