The Cloud People
Iulian Furtuna, Iulian Furtuna & Marius Lena / France & Barbados / 2024 / World Premiere / 49 min
With humour, poetry and an infectious love of science, they look to the white population of the sky for answers to climate change, life's big questions and why some clouds actually stand still.
In Barbados in the Caribbean, they are feeling the effects of climate change harder than the rest of us. Brutal storms have increased over the past several years, making the island a living hell for its residents. But on the other hand, the island has become a paradise for the many climate scientists who flock there to study the complex weather systems and observe the clouds in the sky. The scientists’ scientific joy is contagious, for example, when they finally succeed in measuring the depth of a cloud with Bob Marley on the loudspeaker. Clouds are the visible part of a much larger system that we have difficulty understanding and which has fallen fundamentally out of balance. With an evocative and poetic voice-over, the clouds give rise to larger existential questions about what science can tell us about living on earth and what role the clouds will actually play in the climate crisis. Spliced together with poetry, history and science, ‘The Cloud People’ is a film that will make you look up and change the way you look at the sky and its inhabitants.