David Usui’s Been Here Stay Here documents the residents of Tangier Island, whose home has shrunken by two thirds in the last 150 years due to climate change.
Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake bay off the coast of Virginia, is home to a small but close-knit population of largely fish-reliant citizens. In many ways, they are no different from much of rural America—their ways of life are hardly different. But one thing makes this a novel case: the island, and its inhabitants, are currently facing the consequences of climate change.
Been Here Stay Here is an ethnography of the island: David Usui and crew visit the island to witness and have real conversations with residents, painting a holistic—and incredibly empathetic—picture of how climate change affects all aspects of life from an insider perspective.
To create such a portrait, director David Usui speaks to inhabitants of all perspectives. The fishermen, who make up a significant portion of Tangier Island’s working population, believe the current situation is no different from the natural ebbs and flows of climate that have always affected their industry. A college student from the island, who the interviewers followed to Wesleyan University, offers the perspective of one of the many young people who leave the island to go to big cities—he has first-hand knowledge of global warming that distinguishes him from many of his classmates. The large churchgoing population, meanwhile, believes in the facts of climate change but interrogates their faith’s role in it: as one resident laments, “God does not seem to work fast enough for us.”
Between these interviews with various subsets of the island are intimate moments that showcase the residents’ everyday lives. Many of these moments feature children playing blissfully on the island, or intimate moments of fishing, crabbing, clamming, and duck hunting create an empathetic picture of the everyday. These images are usually paired with voiceover narration reading poetry, highlighting the beauty of the now alongside the uncertainty of the future.
Because of this, Been Here Stay Here is not only an effective documentary but a mood piece: life on the island is captured gorgeously with as little interference or commentary as possible, outside a few appearances from an outside scientist to help contextualize the island’s predicament. But despite the wide variety of opinions presented, there is little to no conflict: the film takes a humanist approach that emphasizes a need to connect with one another as the ultimate solution.
Been Here Stay Here debuted in the Luminous section at IDFA 2024.
