‘Lowland Kids’ review: America’s first climate refugees prepare to leave their Louisiana home

Dir/scr: Sandra Winther. Denmark/USA. 2025. 99mins

The Louisiana bayou neighborhood of Isle de Jean Charles is a magical place, nestling amongst bountiful rivers, beneath honey-kissed sunsets. The tempo of life is blissfully gradual; the neighbourly bonds are unshakeable. However the Isle is on the frontline of an unfolding environmental disaster; now its remaining residents – amongst them orphaned siblings Howard and Juliette, and their clever, wheelchair-bound uncle Chris – are to turn into ’America’s First Local weather Refugees’ within the first federally-funded mass relocation within the US. Shot over six years, the debut characteristic from Danish director Sandra Winther is a lyrical, luminous portrait of lives on the periphery and a narrative that appears destined, sadly, to turn into more and more frequent for future generations.

A lyrical, luminous portrait of lives on the periphery

It’s an especially achieved first characteristic from New York-based Winther, who made a multi-award profitable quick movie, additionally titled Lowland Children, about the identical topics in 2019. Premiering within the Nordic:Dox competitors strand at CPH:DOX, it is a image that might, given an acceptable push by distributors, go on to be a big a part of the awards dialog within the coming months. Darren Aronofsky’s title among the many producer credit definitely received’t damage its prospects.

The Isle de Jean Charles, a wetland surroundings whose inhabitants reside, as Chris evocatively places it, with “one foot on land, and one within the water”, is particularly weak to a mixture of pure and man-made environmental elements. Its place, on the uncovered fringe of southern Louisiana, implies that it has all the time been lashed by the hurricanes that sweep up from the tropics. However local weather change has seen these storms collect power, and the devastating brute power of Hurricane Ida in 2021, which decimates the stilted wood homes and snaps telegraph poles like toothpicks, seems like a tipping level: the second at which life on Isle de Jean Charles now not appears viable.

Then there are the actions of the fossil gas business. Oil and gasoline are huge enterprise on this nook of Louisiana. However for the reason that bayou topography makes bridge constructing impractical, the oil and gasoline corporations have carved navigation canals by way of the wetlands. This allows the salt water to seep into the soil, poisoning most of the timber and additional exposing the Isle to the violence of the winds. And, like lowland communities the world over, the residents of the Isle are on the mercy of rising sea ranges. The Isle de Jean Charles has misplaced 98% of its land mass during the last 60 years.

All of which is alarming. However what makes this documentary so particular is how intimately and persuasively it makes the case that the Isle de Jean Charles is a lot greater than a chunk of land. Andrea Gavazzi’s placing cinematography brings a glowing Beasts Of The Southern Wild-style sense of enchantment to the lives of Howard and Juliette, aged 16 and 14 respectively after we first meet them. Inseparable following the addiction-related deaths of their mother and father, theirs is a lifetime of uncommon freedom, joyous and semi-feral, and lived on and within the water.

The Indigenous neighborhood on the Isle – the individuals who reside listed here are members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation – worth household above all else. However household, for Isle folks, goes past blood bonds. “In south Louisiana there’s an unofficial rule,” says one silver-haired native. “For those who’re my dad or my mom’s buddy, you’re household, it doesn’t matter what.” It’s this heat and sense of mutual assist, as a lot because the wide-open skies and the wild great thing about the place, that give the Isle its attract. The query that looms giant within the hearts of Howard, Juliette and their uncle is whether or not the spirit and solidarity that distinguishes the Isle neighborhood can survive being shifted, wholesale, to a sterile strip of cheaply-constructed new builds on larger floor.