At Memory's Edge: Film and Intersectional Approaches to the Accelerating Climate Crisis in the Canadian Arctic
The title of the chapter “Memory’s Edge” is taken from the title of a book by James Young that engages with the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture but comes out of a field of cultural scholarship developed by mostly Jewish writers that focus on the issue of memory and psychological pain in a more limited European context than the subject of this chapter.
Here I broaden the work done on memory and its aesthetics to address what it means to ethically witness the accelerating social and ecological impact of a warming Arctic through a cultural inquiry into these issues without sentimentalizing or spectacularizing suffering. Traumatic experiences are represented in a range of forms, as the first two films are more accessible documentaries, and the third is fictional, experimental and non-narrative. Each is chosen to spark cross-cultural conversations in an international context in order to open up ways to imagine a different global future.