Sundance Pic Utama Drives Home Impact of Climate Change

Sometimes the quietest films hit the hardest. Utama, the Bolivian drama that premiered at Sundance Film Festival this year, is proof of that.

The film follows an elderly Quechua couple living in the Bolivian highlands as a devastating drought threatens their way of life. Director Alejandro Loayza Grisi presents their story with almost no dramatic embellishment. He doesnt need any. The reality is dramatic enough.

Climate change is often discussed in abstract terms. Rising sea levels. Parts per million of carbon dioxide. Temperature anomalies. Utama makes it concrete and personal. This is what climate change looks like when it happens to real people in real communities.

The elderly couple Virginio and Sisa have lived on their land for their entire lives. Their llamas are dying. Their water sources are drying up. Their grandson wants them to relocate to the city. Every day they face an impossible choice between staying on land that can no longer sustain them and leaving everything theyve ever known.

Grisi shot the film in stunning 4K digital capturing the harsh beauty of the Bolivian altiplano. The landscape itself becomes a character – vast and indifferent to human suffering. The cinematography is gorgeous in a way that makes the tragedy even more poignant.

What really stays with you though are the performances. José Calcina and Luisa Quispe bring decades of lived experience to their roles. Theyre not professional actors which makes their work even more remarkable. The pain in their faces is real because its their own pain.

Utama won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition and it deserved it. This is essential filmmaking about an essential issue presented with grace and humanity.

Not every climate film needs to be an apocalyptic spectacle. Sometimes the apocalypse is slow and quiet and happening right now to people who did nothing to cause it.