by Eve Rogers // Oct. 31, 2025
The Arctic landscape of ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq’ is at once radiant and extreme. Ice cliffs catch pale light, horizons stretch into luminous emptiness, depicting a world so striking it feels almost otherworldly. Against this backdrop, Australian filmmaker and artist Adam Sébire turns his lens to Uummannaq, a small island community in northern Greenland where livelihoods have been sustained by the ice for generations. This is a place where ancient knowledge and Indigenous traditions prevail, revealing a culture that is as resilient as it is dynamic.
Sébire has long dedicated his practice to exploring climate change and the Anthropocene, examining how humans shape, and are shaped by, the planet. Here, he outlines how rising temperatures and increasingly unstable ice patterns have rendered this a landscape in rapid transformation and a population confronted by profound uncertainty.
Screening at Interfilm this November, the film functions as a Hail Mary of sorts—a call to arms and an attempt to capture, preserve and bear witness, before the ice and its inhabitants are irrevocably altered. Seeming to emerge from both the past and future, ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq’ is both elegy and documentary, a meditation on temporality, vulnerability and the ethical necessity of looking.
Adam Sebire: ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq,’ 2025 // Courtesy of the artist
Eve Rogers: As an Australian filmmaker, can you talk a little about what drew you to the Arctic Circle, and to the story of this particular community in northern Greenland?
Adam Sébire: Just before Covid-19 hit, I was up in Svalbard (Spitsbergen) researching a PhD about how to communicate the problems underlying climate change. Australia suddenly closed its doors for 18 months and I’ve ever since been one of the Arctic’s four million human inhabitants, with a front row view! It’s changing four times faster than anywhere else, and the sea ice is thinning so fast that most of us are scared to walk too far on it now. That got me wondering what it must be like for communities accustomed to spending six months every year living, hunting, working and playing on it.
By chance, I discovered that one very remote Greenlandic community was part of the renowned El Sistema music program for children-at-risk. I thought: these might be the children who can help tell the story of their sea ice. And their singing became a recurring motif of the film. But their island of just over 1000 Inuit people is dealing with a lot of changes: decolonization, globalization and now climate change. All have transformed old subsistence lifestyles very rapidly.
Adam Sebire: ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq,’ 2025 // Courtesy of the artist
ER: The landscape in ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq’ feels almost like a character in its own right. In what ways did you let the environment dictate the artistic choices of the film?
AS: Well, for one thing, I had to accept that I wasn’t going to get funding to take a film crew simply because it was so uncertain when the ice would stabilize. So I had to do all the technical roles myself when I arrived for a month in mid-February.
Also, at -15ºC I couldn’t hang around outside observing life as a documentary filmmaker normally would! On-ice activities have become very unpredictable there. I’d previously made a multi-screen video artwork called ‘Sikujumaataarpoq’ about this problem; it follows both humans and non-humans during polar night, where this enormous transition, from liquid landscapes to solid ones, kept getting stuck somewhere in-between.
So, you’re right, the landscape was a character, and one that storms out: half the ice cover just breaks up and disappears very dramatically near the film’s end. It was shocking for the locals to witness this happening in early March.
Adam Sebire: ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq,’ 2025 // Courtesy of the artist
ER: You collaborated closely with the youngest and oldest members of the community in a shared act of storytelling. How did the use of these two different perspectives shape the film?
AS: The elders (who worked or volunteered at the Children’s Home over the years) were a benchmark for what had been; the youth were the ones whose future was melting before their eyes. So I wanted to film both participating in cultural heritage dependent on sea ice.
Adam Sebire: ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq,’ 2025 // Courtesy of the artist
ER: By using a neologism as your title, you’re highlighting a community in flux. What does the word “sikoqqinngisaannassooq” itself reveal about their experience of environmental change and all that is at stake in the face of it?
AS: Part of the film’s pre-production was collecting words in the local Kalaallisut dialect that described problems posed by the changing sea ice conditions. The children chose a word each, discussed its meaning, and we decided how to film it. But it’s a polysynthetic language that can build multiple concepts into a single word, so I asked Rebi, one of the social workers, to form a word that expressed the increasingly likely possibility of “a future without sea ice.” ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq’ was the result. It took the children quite a while to write its 22 letters in the snow with hunters’ tooqs!
And it proved sadly prophetic: the following year, 2025, the community experienced no stable sea ice. One of my friends there messaged me in May: “No sea ice in Uummannaq. We havent been able to go out at all. Many tons of fish was not caught, so many have struggled.” And he means struggled psychologically, not just for food and livelihoods.
Adam Sebire: ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq,’ 2025 // Courtesy of the artist
ER: The diverse programming at Interfilm brings together audiences who might never experience the Arctic firsthand. How do you hope your film helps viewers connect with the realities and culture of Uummannaq, and what do you want them to take away from that encounter?
AS: No matter how much scientific knowledge of climate change we might have, I think it’s not until we form an emotional connection that it can deeply move us towards climate action. So I hope hearing directly from the people most affected about how they feel might offer an entry point.
Climate change can feel very hard to grasp, but being on fragile sea ice, knowing it holds your life in the balance, is a very visceral connection that’s hard to communicate. Just by travelling to Greenland to make the film, I’d caused several square metres of it to be destroyed (based on climate attribution research for an artwork called ‘Adrift’ that I’d made in 2018). So I felt I could only justify this if the film was seen widely. For an audience in Berlin, I hope it gives firsthand insight into how whole existences are changing on the front lines of climate change. The Arctic Ocean will probably be sea-ice-free for the first time somewhere between 2030-2050. But there’s still a chance to retain some of the coastal sea ice that humans and non-humans rely upon, if we take strong climate action now.
Festival Info
Interfilm
41st International Short Film Festival Berlin
Festival: Nov. 4–9, 2025
Adam Sébire: ‘Sikoqqinngisaannassooq’
Screenings: Nov. 5, 2025; 6pm & Nov. 7, 2025; 8:30pm
interfilm.de
Zeiss-Großplanetarium Kino, Prenzlauer Allee 80, 10405 Berlin, click here for map
Kino & Bar in der Königstadt, Straßburger Str. 55, 10405 Berlin, click here for map
