Rethinking the Climate Storytelling
- Shuvangi Khadka
- Jun 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 20
Shuvangi Khadka
I have been thinking about how films make us care. Films that do not scream a message but allows for a shift in the audience.
We live in a world where every scroll and notification delivers another breaking news or urgent headline. But it’s in the stories that we seek something deeper. Every story is, in some way, a retelling of an old one, but it’s the telling that needs to be different. So, what does that mean for documentary films with their archetype structure of interviews and b-roll?
I watched the documentary film Nocturnes at an ironic time. In Kathmandu, the peak of winter was passing with barely a drop of rain. During one of those dry nights, in pitch darkness, I listened to the rain falling in dense forests of Arunachal Pradesh, India, with a deep longing to be there. This is the reality we are living with, where climate change is causing extreme weather patterns and also causing moths to disappear from higher temperatures.
Nocturnes is a 2024 feature film directed by Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta. Watching it at the dead of the night, the film asked for my patience, similar to what its human protagonist, Mansi is harbouring, while putting up white light screens in the middle of the night, waiting for moths to appear. Mansi is a quantitative ecologist on a mission to catalogue Himalayan moths.
It’s essentially a scientific film but we don’t see the science; we feel it. The film brings attention to biodiversity and nature without uttering heavy words. There are fewer words spoken and more visuals and natural sounds to create an immersive experience of being in the forest. Humans are framed as a small part of this big, overpowering nature. They have visually shown that, ‘Humans are newcomers’, whether through a tiny silhouette of a person walking in the dense forest engulfed with fog or at night, when a white piece of cloth tries to resemble the moon.
Personally, I am someone driven by plot points. I follow to see if Anton's gun is fired or if the next scene propels the story forward. But as I watched Nocturnes- without a big plot, something kept me going. It was its visual language. The long shots transport us to the forest, bringing us face-to-face with the beauty and fragility of nature. I wasn’t watching to follow what happens next but to be in that meditative space for as long as I could. As I watched Mansi making her way through the forest, I also wondered who this person was and what intrigued her towards moths.
What I missed in Nocturnes was covered by a Bhutanese short documentary film I recently watched called, Mountain Man by Arun Bhattarai. Mountain Man follows Phuntsho Tshering, Bhutan’s glacier specialist, who is the only person authorized to climb the Himalayan country’s sacred mountains. He spends months away from home measuring the rapidly melting glaciers while faithfully recording videos on his phone for his daughter, Yangchen. In Mountain Man, there is more emphasis on the personal journey of this person who isolates himself for months in natural study.
The documentation of both of these scientists signals how science, data collection, and research can find a place in creative filmmaking. How attention can be drawn in far-reaching effects of climate change, without on-the-face information. In Nocturnes, this is primarily done through images and sounds of nature. In contrast, Mountain Man takes a more personal approach with a focus on the relationship between father and daughter. There’s something intimate about seeing video clips of the journey sent by the father to his daughter- it is like getting access to someone’s phone gallery.
In Mountain Man, Yangchen’s school teacher says, “We are all children of the same sun.” While it is said in the context of humans, it also applies to every creature living on the planet. Any impact on one species can create a ripple effect, threatening the survival of other interconnected species. Research shows that the loss of moth species can trigger further species decline and disrupt overall ecosystem functions (Wagner, Fox, Salcido, & Dyer, 2021). Nocturnes succeeds in evoking this feeling of being part of nature and interconnectedness.Being interconnected also means the joint sharing of climate calamities. Even though Bhutanese regard mountains and lakes to be sacred and Bhutan is a carbon-negative country, it has been facing the brunt of climate change. Mountain Man helps put a human face to the global discourse on climate change.
Not only humans, but also the language we speak is a part of nature. In Nocturnes, Mansi asks the name of the moth to her indigenous assistant Bicki (belonging to the local Bugun tribe), who tells her the local name. Indigenous languages also carry with them the terminology for the preservation of nature and biological diversity. But as plants and species disappear, language and dialects can also follow a similar pattern of decline. In the essay, The Languages Lost To Climate Change, Ayuso writes, “Increasingly, Indigenous communities are pointing to the inextricable link between language and biodiversity as evidence that humans are not separate from nature, but very much a part of it”.There is not only loss of moths, snow and glacial lakes but also languages. This language and knowledge form a crucial part of one’s culture and identity. This is especially important for communities living in fragile and vulnerable regions like the Himalayas.
At its heart, every story is a retelling but it’s how we narrate it that makes it matter. Climate change as an antagonist seems to be one of the recurring stories of our times. But how do we narrate it differently? How do we talk about changing landscapes, disappearing biodiversity, and the erosion of culture and identity without falling into the numbness of statistics? Creative documentaries like Nocturnes and Mountain Man offer an answer. They reimagine climate storytelling—not through data, but through emotion, deep reflection and the human experience.
References
Ayuso, J. W. (2025, January 28). The Languages Lost To Climate Change. Noema Magazine.
Bhattarai, A. (Director). (2022). Mountain Man [Documentary].
Dutta, A., & Srinivasan, A. (Directors). (2024) Nocturnes [Documentary]. Grasshopper Films
Wagner, D. L., Fox, R., Salcido, D. M., & Dyer, L. A. (2021). A window to the world of global insect declines: Moth biodiversity trends are complex and heterogeneous. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(2).
Writer
Shuvangi Khadka is a writer and documentary filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Editor Taw Yalla is a lifelong student of history and is currently working in the Arts and Culture sector. In her pastime, she likes reading historical fiction books and watching anime and pet videos.
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