Environment, experimental | United Kingdom

“Narstalgia” is an experimental short film concerning the phenomena related to the eco-grief happening in the Arctic, including that ‘Greenland has the world’s highest suicide rate’, and ‘Iceland holds funeral for melted glacier due to Climate Change’. The title itself is also a word coined by Director Robert based on his artistic research, which is a combination of ‘Narwhal’ and ‘Solastalgia’, with the name of narwhal having connotation of human death in Old Norse.

‘Solastalgia’ mentioned above is a term coined by an Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to describe the relationship between climate change and mental health of people who live in rapidly changing environments; it also means feeling homesick when you are at home. Since knowing that Iceland holds a funeral for its glacier, Robert went there for a field study in 2019 to film footages and record sounds, plus interview local people and researchers in order to understand how these people feel about the dramatic changes of their home environments.