A lot of visual media exists about climate change. We have films and documentaries that look at climate change as a grand occurrence that will manifest with apocalypse-level events reminiscent of some variation of Dean Devlin’s Geostorm. But that is not what Above Water does.
This documentary follows fourteen-year-old Houlaye, of the Wodaabe Fulani people who live in Tatiste, Niger and have to travel several kilometres to the only source of water the community has. Acclaimed French actress Aïssa Maïga casts her camera on the community over the period of a year, showing us the effects of climate change and the slow transformation of a formerly nomadic community.
The title of the documentary can be taken literally. In one scene a school teacher tells their students in French that underneath the ground they are standing on lies all the water they need, but cannot reach as they are waiting for the government to drill a borehole for them. According to a World Bank report, temperatures in the regions of Niger and other Sahel countries are rising 1.5 times faster than the rest of the world and access to water is becoming increasingly difficult. Above Water takes this statistic and gives it a place, time, faces, emotions, and ultimately life. Many of the shots leave your throat parched and the camera lingers on the children of the community playing, crying, or washing themselves with water. These scenes in their silence look to the future of the community.
Early in the documentary, in October, we see the community in a meeting agree to send a letter to the town authorities requesting a borehole. They are then visited by the prefect of their region and he begins to talk about the children staying in school instead of their pressing water needs. This reflects the painful pace of things under a bureaucracy that refuses to take action. The borehole doesn’t come until October the next year in a scene of wet joy and communal hope as the children dance under the spray of water that has finally found its way from under the ground.
There is also a focus throughout the film on the women of the Wodaabe Fulani people, which leans into the broader conversation about how they are disproportionately affected by climate change. In the beginning, they are talking about the need for a water source and are even the ones that bring it up in the meeting saying, “It’s women who suffer the most.” This is seen later on when we watch a group of them travel to Nigeria to work and come home with money, leaving Houlaye to take care of the smaller children. The women play a crucial, but overlooked, role in adapting to this new reality, a rainy season that used to last several months reduced to significantly less forces them to migrate to places that can be hostile to them.
Above Water has a distinct lack of a voiceover, allowing the portrait of the desert landscape to tell its story with the help of the conversations the people have. The harsh wind of Tatiste soundtracks a huge chunk of the film, the constant dry rush carrying dust to their hair, skin, and clothes. Scarcity is visualized by the scraping of the empty metal drums to get the last drops of murky water and a scene where you are made to stare into the abyss of the well as you wait for a man to come out. There is an almost magical transformation that comes with July, the grounds green with life from the rains, but we are quickly taken back to the dryness of October — the rainy season fleeting. All these come together to create a visually stunning and effective documentary that allows you to feel and understand these people’s predicament without spoon feeding facts and figures.
In this documentary, we are guided by magnificent visuals, intimate dialogue, and real people through a story of many changes to a once nomadic community trying to settle because of the effects of climate change, their customs and traditions contorting to this new reality. We see the education of the children as some kind of hope, with their teacher excited to teach and help the community. Though the community gets a borehole in the end, after an hour plus of following them on journeys to and from the well, one might wonder who is to blame for their predicament. Most of the pollution and causes of climate change are from the west but this poor region in Niger is facing most of the consequences. Their lack of water is just one facet of a multifaceted problem and after this borehole, what next? We have seen countless times that the solutions to global problems are implemented in Western countries first before the crumbs reach the global south which means the solutions to climate change might not reach the village of Tatiste first despite them needing the help most.
