Talpatti
We live at zero hour of the Anthropocene, on the brink of planetary climate crisis. Bangladesh is predicted as the first nation that will go underwater within fifty years. A diplomatic war between India and Bangladesh over the Talpatti islands encapsulates the same human greed that endangers our planet. This island magically emerged in the ocean after a cyclone in 1970, and was discovered by an American satellite. India and Bangladesh almost went to war over possession, claiming the British colonizers had never drawn lines into water. The fight was over oil, believed to be in waters near the island. After another typhoon, the island disappeared, snatching away this object of obsession. Building on the epic scale of his past films on the Cold War archives, this feature film blends fiction and archive to ask: how do you tell stories of parts of the earth that have already disappeared?