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VANISHING

What’s it like to live in a place that cannot be saved?

VANISHING

What’s it like to live in a place that cannot be saved?

The climate crisis is here.

The climate crisis is here.


Despite global preventative efforts, our climate - and our relationship to it - faces unprecedented change within the coming decades. There are communities around the globe that will become uninhabitable within the lifetimes of their current residents. Loss is inevitable.

Envisioned as a series, Vanishing seeks to acknowledge this harsh reality and preserve the stories, ways of life, and emotional truths of communities in existential danger.

This is intended as a historical document as well as a film series.

Our First Episode

Our First Episode

Our opening episode is set in Southern Louisiana, the first state in the United States to designate certain communities to be “lost” (as per the (LA SAFE report of 2019.)

These communities will no longer receive state funds and resources to prevent sea level rise, and their citizens are recommended to relocate in the years to come.
The state is losing nearly a football field’s worth of land every hour.
No one will be forced to leave. Many will stay until they no longer physically can.

The Series

The Series



Each episode of Vanishing will be approximately 30 minutes in length, focusing on one specific region in direct threat.
We seek to capture lives on the frontlines: individuals whose homes sit on the borderline of habitability. Interviews with these residents will inform the narratives of each episode. Some individuals we will follow in greater depth, utilizing their roles and professions to garner pieces of a community mosaic as well as an understanding of their individual issues. There will be no host. We must allow these communities to tell their own stories.
We are running out of time. Our focus is on populations that are likeliest to face permanent relocation in the near future, within two decades at most.
Communities in coastal regions, areas of extreme heat and aridity, lands reliant on tundra and ice, breadbaskets turned to dust bowls… These urgently threatened locales and their people are our subjects.
These communities are often impoverished or working class — their livelihoods in peril. Through a lens of intimacy, we will grasp the raw realities of these individuals’ inherently dramatic lives, intercut with footage of their environments and visualizations of their encroaching climate-driven threats.

We must allow these communities to tell their own stories.

We must allow these communities to tell their own stories.

Exposing these emotionally rooted perspectives, we not only seek to relate the uniquely human reactions to extreme climate change, but also to honor and preserve peoples’ heritage, culture and lives. Let’s see through their eyes — through the nostalgia of youth to the wisdom of age, memories of places already destined to be lost yet which are still here — with the setting as much of a character as the individuals themselves.
For the locales, our role is as archivists. Anticipating how our descendants would want to see places they can no longer visit, we will capture the environments with a sense of both intimacy and voyeurism. How would the future want to preserve the past?
This is not a debate on climate science — we will undoubtedly meet individuals who do not trust scientific expertise. This is an important, Vanishing opportunity to respect communities in crisis, preserve their ways of life and allow their inhabitants to authentically speak their piece.

How would the future want to preserve the past?

How would the future want to preserve the past?


Future Episodes

Future Episodes

Each episode of Vanishing will investigate an individual biome, a representative of universal issues tackling different communities around the globe.

Scroll Through Episodes

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“…by the time I’m old enough to establish my own family and stuff down there, it’s pretty much not gonna be worth it if they don’t something about it.”

-Brett Bourgeouis, Lousiana

subdirectory_arrow_right EXTREME HEAT
Australia faces continued unprecedented bushfires, the 2019-2020 season already burning 13.6 million acres and killing an estimated 1 billion animals.

subdirectory_arrow_right PERMAFROST THAW
Siberia and the polar region are warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet. Reindeer farmers have seen their populations drop over 50% as a result of permafrost thaw and drought.

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“What kind of monetary value do you put on a culture and heritage?”

-Capt. George Ricks, Louisiana

subdirectory_arrow_right GROUNDWATER DEPLETION

Chennai, the 4th largest city in India, reached the dreaded Day Zero in 2019 with all of it’s water reservoirs running dry. Despite a plentiful monsoon season, their reservoir levels are currently at less than 30% capacity.

subdirectory_arrow_right COASTAL SEA LEVEL RISE

Kiribati is one of the first island chains expected to disappear, with most of it being just a few hundred meters wide and with an average height of 1.8 meters above sea level.

subdirectory_arrow_right EXTREME HEAT AND DROUGHT

For 10 years now, the central region of Chile has suffered what scientists call a “megadrought,” with annual rainfall as much as 70% below normal.

subdirectory_arrow_right COASTAL SEA LEVEL RISE

Bangladesh has both one of the largest population densities on earth and one of the most susceptible coastlines to extreme flooding and sea level rise. An estimated 100,000 people migrate away from the coasts every year.

We feel there is a hunger for blunt, emotionally based climate storytelling.



DIRECTOR

Adam Chitayat
Adam has worked with some of the worlds finest production companies, clients & creatives based out of his homebase in Brooklyn, NY. Working most prominently in music videos and commercials before venturing into documentaries, his work has been shown at the Denver Film Festival, the Jim Thorpe Film Festival, and the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. His projects have cumulatively been viewed over 9 million times. With his work, he wants you to feel, think deeply, and be mesmerized. The climate crisis has been a rattling anxiety in his brain for as long as he can remember. He believes stories can make a difference, and in this crisis are essential.
CINEMATOGRAPHER

Tom Atwell
Tom has been expressing through visuals from a young age and is lucky to have grown along side his craft. With a diverse body of work ranging from feature and short films, music videos and commercials, Tom is a true collaborator and shapes his visual language to compliment its subject. He seeks to bring his work as a filmmaker to the service of outreach, empathy, and to support marginalized voices.


Most climate media is concerned with the macro of the earth as a whole, a reasonable approach, but one that leaves an audience coming away with too far away to feel relatable to their lives, or to those they could know.

Creating work in the opposite metric — crafting
intimate portraits of communities
on the forefront of adaptation or extinction — we will be able to build a strong, personal empathy with audiences who are otherwise closed off to the urgency of climate change as an issue. While these stories are
unique to each region,
they are also universal to the human experience in the face of a global climate crisis.

We seek to
preserve the stories, culture, and images
of these endangered regions.

We are seeking potential collaborators, partners and advisors.

Please, reach out and join us


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