Filmmaker Statement

Frontier Town explores how people react to the very real threat of the climate crisis - the minutiae of our lives take centre stage, yet we live with, and often ignore, this constant existential uncertainty. Fairbourne was interesting to us because the people have been forced to confront that head on. By 2050, 150 million people worldwide could be forced to leave their homes because of rising sea levels alone. Fairbourne is just one of millions of communities anxiously waiting for the tide to come in, demonstrating that it’s not just happening “over there”, in distant countries. The waves are lapping at our door and we aren’t taking it nearly seriously enough. We wanted to connect with the climate crisis in a human way, focusing on character, story, myth, rumour, uncertainty... This is the climate crisis in real time. Since discovering its fate, Fairbourne has often been reduced to a headline or statistic. Frontier Town puts the people back at the heart of the story.