2025 | 1 HOUR 10 MINUTES 26 SECONDS | ENGLISH / MARSHALLESE | 25FPS

The Our Life is Here film is a seventy minute arts drama / documentary filmed during the Cape Farewell expedition to five atolls in the Marshall Islands/Pacific Ocean - 12th August - 23rd August 2023.

Central to the expedition was a week-long residency at Bikini Atoll, the site of 23 USA atomic bomb detonations. The two crews of Marshallesee leaders, an international team of artists and writers, a Marshallese youth team and film crew visited the site of Castle Bravo, the largest USA nuclear explosion ever. The Marshall Islands now face their second existential threat from climate change and rising sea levels - both unwanted ‘gifts’ from afar.

Our Life is Here references the unfairness caused and resilience of the Marshallese people, documented in the film over the course of the expedition. The ‘Our’ also narrates our own international threat as the planet overheats stressing our own habitats. The Marshallese story is relevant to all of us as we face uncertain futures created by mankind. 

The onboard teams of artists created artistic and performance interventions filmed by our crew in the Marshall Islands and subsequently in their International studios. Swimming to the centre of Bravo Crater, diving on the seabed, creating Cyanotypes among the waves and shoreline, exploring Japanese wartime colonialism, projecting headline texts into the breaking waves and writers narrating the brutilist atomic legacy structures. Sailing and leaving a traditional ‘canoe’ on Bikini, chants referring to wayfinding navigation, climate political action by Marshallese elders and youth and a longing for a homeland now forcefully abandoned due to radiation levels. It is a compelling story told in and among mindbending beauty and homeland tragedy. 

Shot in 4K Ultra High Definition, 24 fps, with spectacular drone footage and underwater cameras filming in and among the resident sharks, turtles and radiated shorelines. The soundscore by Philip Glass perfectly mirrors that this film is about now, 21st century, in a world that is stressed. 

The current shared Vimeo is a stereo version reduced down from the high resolution video and the surround sound cinema original.

In 2001, Buckland created and now directs the international Cape Farewell project. Bringing artists, visionaries, scientists and educators together, Cape Farewell continues to build an international collective awareness and the cultural response to climate disruption. Over 300 artists have created operas, films, artworks, pop music and novels which address the climate challenge and through the process of making art, vision a sustainable and exciting cultural future. The Archive of Cape Farewell is being taken by the Nevada Museum of Art, USA.

David Buckland is an artist, film-maker, writer and curator. His solo exhibitions include the Musee National d’Art Modern, Paris 1980; the Sander Gallery, New York 1984; The Photographers’ Gallery London in 1987; Espace Photographique de la Ville de Paris, 1987; the Minneapolis Institute of Art 1989; the Museum of Contemporary Photography 1990; Zwemmer Gallery, London, 1994; The National Portrait Gallery, London 1999. His work is included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Michael Wilson Collection, London and the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

Our Life is Here is the third broadcast quality film produced by Cape Farewell. Art from the Arctic directed by David Hinton, broadcast on the BBC and World Service 2006. Burning Ice, broadcast on Sundance Television 2012. 

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.

Born in Savannah, GA, Brock Scott is an artist, photographer and filmmaker living in Seattle, WA. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Atlanta College of Art in 2009, Brock worked in the film industry on television and in major motion pictures such as The Walking Dead, Fast and Furious, and The Hunger Games. His experience in the film industry informed him of state-of-the-art techniques and knowledge that have been fundamental to his development as a filmmaker. In 2015, Brock became an independent documentary filmmaker, enjoying successful collaborations with BBC, Netflix, New Georgia Project, Adult Swim, and CDC. His film, Boxcar Fair, won the AIAP International Motion Award and was an Official Selection of the SXSW film festival.

Scott is currently the founder of On the Grid Creative (OTGC), a Seattle based creative agency producing award-winning video productions focused on storytelling and social impact. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, Brock has worked with CDC and Living Walls to create a series of short documentaries informing people in Georgia about the importance of vaccination. Brock was also part of a public health campaign with Southern Fried Queer Pride promoting awareness regarding LGBTQ+ health and HIV prevention. He was the director of a 2020 film campaign with New Georgia Project to encourage voter turnout.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and now based in Los Angeles, Marcus studied environmental policy at Occidental College, where he authored a policy proposal for the city of Los Angeles titled Just Transition in Los Angeles. He is a filmmaker and video editor currently working on The Global Game, a football-focused travel series that explores how culture, history, and politics intersect to shape communities around the world.

Marcus has filmed five episodes so far—across Thailand, Morocco, Austria, Serbia, and Brazil—showcasing how local traditions, cuisine, and social bonds inspire the beautiful game far beyond the pitch.

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is a Marshallese poet, performance artist and educator. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, the Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Kathy also co-founded the youth environmentalist non-profit Jo-Jikum dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home islands. Kathy has been selected as one of 13 Climate  Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016. She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Michael Light is a photographer and bookmaker focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it.  For the last two decades, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime. 22 editions of his seven books have been published worldwide.
A private pilot and Guggenheim Fellow in photography, he is currently working on an extended aerial survey of the arid Western states. Radius Books published the first of a multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, in 2009. The second, LA Day/LA Night, was released in 2011. The third, Lake Las
Vegas/Black Mountain, was published in 2015. The fourth, Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville, was released in September 2019.

Light is also known for his globally-published archival works. His first, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by the Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact. 100 SUNS (2003) focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1962. He has had solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hasselblad Center, Goteborg, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno.

Alson is a Bikinian cultural elder and master navigator and the director of Waan Aelõñ in Majel (WAM). WAM is a program that is committed to empowering young Marshallese men and women by giving them the skills they need to move forward into a sustainable and happy future. Waan Aelõñ in Majel (WAM) is committed to empowering the young men and women of the Marshall Islands, endowing them with the skillset essential to bring them into the global society in which we find ourselves today. WAM uses traditional Marshallese skills for men and women as a medium to transfer needed life skills and capacity building to the youth of the Marshall Islands. The WAM program promotes sustainable economic and cultural development, national unity and self-identity.

Alson was also the Mayor of Bikini Atoll (November 2009 to 2011); Councilman for Bikini Atoll (November 2007 to November 2009); Chairman of Marshall Islands Shipping Corporation (2006 to 2015); and President, Council of NGOs (2005 to present). Member of the National Nuclear Commission 2018.