Four Vietnamese garner special award at global climate film contest

A team of four young Vietnamese has grabbed a special award at a global documentary competition held in the U.S.

“The Change,” a video by Ha Uyen, Huong Tra, Quang Dung, and Quang Phuc, won the “Connect4Climate” prize at the “Action4Climate” contest awards ceremony organized in Washington D.C on October 30.

The video tells the story of Vietnam’s central city of Da Nang, which is a highly vulnerable to climate change place, where the recently unpredictable patterns of typhoons and floods have caused severe damage.

Another prize-winning video was “Tinau” by Victoria Burns from the UK, which voiced concern over the fate of small islands, such as Kiribati in the Central Pacific, which could be lost to rising sea levels in the next 50 years.

The special prizes were awarded to documentaries that present local stories which also have a profound global impact.

In the group of contestants aged 14 to 17, Argentine Francina Ramos’s animated film “The Violin Player,” a story about a violinist playing at a theater who sees the entire world melting when he closes his eyes, took the top spot.

The second prize was given to Constantin Huet from Switzerland for his 8-minute video “Facing the Flood,” which raises deep concern about global warming that has seriously affected the ice sheet in Greenland.

The third prize went to Tura Tegerashivili from Georgia for the whimsical “It’s Easy If You Try.”

All of the prize winners will receive production equipment and software to help them hone their skills and talent and inspire them to create more climate change stories, according to the Action4Climate website.

In the 18-35 age category, the $15,000 top prize went to Portuguese film maker Gonçalo Tocha for his film “The Trail of a Tale” which talks about a letter written in the future to society today.

Dobrin Kashavelov from Bulgaria won second place and a cash prize of $10,000 with “Global Warning,” a film about the impact of last year’s Haiyan typhoon on survivors in the Philippines.

Third place and a $5,000 prize were awarded to American filmmaker Nathan Dappen for “Snows of the Nile,” an 18-minute documentary that depicts the fast disappearing glaciers of Uganda’s “Mountains of the Moon,” a mountain range whose highest peaks are permanently snow-capped.

The People’s Choice award was claimed by a team from Brazil for their film “Pachamama,” which chronicled the effects of global warming in their home state of Sao Paulo.

The “Action4Climate” video challenge invited aspiring young filmmakers to produce and submit a 1-12 minute video documentary telling a story about climate change. The contest, launched in early 2014, received more than 230 films from youths representing 70 countries around the world.

It is part of the campaign “Connect4Climate” which aims at creating a participatory, open knowledge platform that engages the global community in climate change conversation to drive local action through advocacy, operational support, research, and capacity building.

“It demonstrates the level of concern shown by creative young people and their desire to be involved directly in exposing climate problems and finding lasting solutions,” Connect4Climate quoted program manager Lucia Grenna as saying on its website.

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