In February 2018, The Kimberly Foundation invited secondary students studying at Canadian secondary and post-secondary institutions to submit a video on the subject of Climate Change.
Maple Leaf World School – TRU student Taishi, Jingwen (Alexx) submitted a video entry into the competition. The entrants were to address climate change from any perspective: social, scientific, technological, environmental, economical, architectural, and/or on the basis of indigenous or traditional knowledges. Alexx submitted an animated short film titled “Remains”.
For her film, Alexx has been selected as one of the four prize winning finalists. Alexx will be attending the Red Carpet Screening on June 9th in Vancouver. As one of four finalists, she has already won $2500 for her creative effort. Her film was selected from 160 entries involving more than 400 students, from 8 Canadian Provinces and 85 institutions.
The Kimberly Foundation judges wrote about her entry, “In reviewing your video, our esteemed panel of judges and the Board of Directors note in particular you have produced a very original film that is also a great technical achievement. The animation is beautiful, and the chosen soundtrack is powerful and effectively conveys and carries the emotional content of the film. The judges also found the approach of typing, and retyping a very interesting technique that, when combined with the quality of drawings, results in an extraordinary overall effect.”
“My choice to make a short film about the human impacts on the planet’s climate comes from my concern about the issue. We see it all around us. It’s in the news everywhere, sea levels rising, polar caps melting, empirical evidence is mounting. I sometimes feel that the issue of climate change is too impersonal, and so removed from daily experience. I sometimes feel that environmental issues are almost accepted, or maybe acceptable. We just re-post what we see in Instagram and keep on doing what causes the problem. I settled on a creative exercise that comes from my knowledge of the NASA Voyager missions, beginning in 1971. As a grade 12 student I am very familiar with textbook climate science, and Hollywood portrayals of science fiction. I don’t have much ambition for my film to be remembered by viewers. I hope that my film can be seen, in part, as a statement about how ephemeral environmental messages are. In my film, the Voyager 1 observes its own last moments of existence, as a reflection of the mistakes humans made, leading to their own demise. Voyager was a gift to intelligent beings, but somehow it became our only “Remains”. The topic of human impact on the climate is very important to me, and I think my film is a warning about the consequences of ignoring the evidence”, Alexx wrote about her film.