I recently spoke with Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, the filmmakers of Arctic Tale, a film about walruses and polar bears dealing with climate change. In the interview I touched on their interest in the Arctic, some issues of wildlife photography, and their view of the future for the Arctic inhabitants.

Adam spoke of how they came to be so involved with the Arctic:

Ten, fifteen years ago we were young, ambitious photographers and in the wildlife industry the idea was to find something that no one had ever seen before or documented. I actually was on a wildlife series that was an underwater series, mostly in the tropics, and at the very end they took us to the Arctic, and I went diving through a seal hole thirty inches in diameter into water temperatures that were only twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and I dropped into these ice corridors and it was almost like an epiphany. It was the most amazing view I’d ever seen with the cathedral-like lighting that came through. And there were lots of animals that were unknown. So that’s where it began and we were sort of hooked and we’ve been there ever since.

Their connection to the Arctic extends to the Inuit, an indigenous people of the North. Sarah spoke a bit about that relationship:

We do take our children up. We hire Inuit families to come out onto the land with us so that our children have other kids to play with and they can be taken care of. We have known many of these Inuit people for years, and we have learned everything we know from them about surviving off the land. They have an incredible knowledge of the animals. Their relationship with the animals is so interconnected because they’re subsistence hunters. They really need the animals to live—to survive themselves.

The film concentrates just on the loss of polar bear and walrus potentially, but equally, the Inuit would be at a total loss without the animals and without the ice. Climate change is going to affect them just as severely as the animals.

In the film, there is an emotional scene dealing with the death of a young animal. While it is proper not to intervene, I asked them about their feelings of filming such scenes. Sarah responded:

You know, when you look though a lens at a very sad scene, you can disassociate yourself from it and step away from it a little bit. Adam is mostly looking through the lens and I have to look at the whole wide picture, so I react essentially a little differently than he does. Sometimes I even ask him to turn off the camera or to stop because it’s too intimate or too emotional. But that’s why I have him around, because he keeps on filming.

And Adam went on:

I, of course, don’t stop. ... With the polar bears you really do jeopardize your own life if you jump in. So that is a pretty easy decision. But you can actually channel that emotion through the lens. I think that is why it is so emotional for people that they can make that connection. Because really, through the lens I’m trying to document and compose it to represent what is actually happening in the wild.

Adam also spoke of the dangers of being so close to the animals:

Every year we come across stories where someone gets eaten. It’s a reality when you are living side by side with big predators, and they are very curious. So we always have meet-and-greet sessions with polar bears. We always have to persuade them and negotiate them away from us and to go along with their daily lives. This is a huge reality. That’s one of the reasons we like to work with the Inuit people, who are expert hunters and trackers. We do carry shotguns and rifles, but we’re very proud that over the years we’ve never had our crew members injured or harmed, and we never harmed a polar bear. And we’ve been able to get them to accept our presence and get some of the remarkable images that we do.

As to their hope for the future of these animals, Sarah said:

I think we are very hopeful. The film is really a celebration of these animals’ qualities—their tremendous resourcefulness, their boldness, their abilities to learn new things, their courage. We’re showing decisions in the moment of how animals can change because of their great intelligence. So we’re very hopeful that polar bears will have the capacity to survive in a new world.