Climate Mobilities in Contemporary Fiction Film

Climate disruption is a factor (among many) in the alteration of contemporary patterns of (im)mobility—from linear, long-term migration to more localized, circular movements—, a dimension recently conceptualized under the notion of “climate mobilities” (Wiegel et al. 2019; Boas et al. 2022). And yet, while the material and conceptual connections between cinema and the environment have increasingly gained prominence in film studies, mobility concerns remain largely overlooked in the field. Bringing together scholarship from the mobilities turn, childhood studies, and film studies, this paper seeks to fill that gap by exploring the ways in which cinema articulates the relationship between mobility and environmental degradation by means of the child figure. Defined by Nicole Seymour as the “sacred cow of environmental art, activism, and discourse” (2018, 180), the figure of the child features prominently in representations of climate mobilities, both in non-fictional and fictional works. The set of cultural values associated to childhood in Western thought—in particular innocence, victimhood, and futurity (Jenks 2005)—make of the child a powerful ideological vehicle from which to articulate environmental concerns.

Adopting Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland (2020) as case study, this paper contends that contemporary fiction films use the figure of the vulnerable child to present climate mobilities as de-contextualized phenomena. Inasmuch as the child is conceptualized as a victim, combining a complete lack of responsibility over environmental destruction with a raised vulnerability to its effects, these films prompt viewers to understand mobility as resulting from the need to “save” the child. The implicit call to “protect the child” emphasizes the role of climate events as the only factor which shapes mobility patterns, and this way diverts attention from the rest of factors at play. In other words, such representational choices obscure the varied aspirations and larger sociopolitical frameworks embedded in climate mobilities.