Director's statement:
I wanted to make a film about a place that feels almost impossible to imagine, and yet is real: the Diomede Islands, divided by a political border and separated by only 2 miles of water. On Little Diomede, the landscape is beautiful, unforgiving, and increasingly unstable. It felt like the right place to tell a story about isolation—not only physical isolation, but the isolation that comes from watching a world disappear around you.
DIOMEDE focuses on two people, just two miles apart, yet living in completely different worlds. One of the last people left alive on Little Diomede is a determined female named Meriwa, who spends her days (and nights) hunting, chopping wood, and trying to sustain herself enough to see another sunrise. On the opposite island, in Russia, a soldier named Alexey watches her from an observation tower. He can see her, but he cannot reach her. Though an ice bridge forms between the islands each winter, it is forbidden to cross. Their relationship is built entirely around distance and observation. One person is fighting to survive, while the other can only witness it.
The thriller framework allows me to approach climate change indirectly. I’m interested in the fear that comes from environmental collapse, but I didn’t want to make a film that simply tells the audience what to think. Instead, I wanted climate change to exist as a pressure within the world of the film: the disappearance of food, the changing behavior of animals on the little island, the breakdown of an ecosystem, and the terrifying question of what happens when a place can no longer sustain the people who call it home.
The animals on the island are victims of the same collapse as the people around them. When hunger turns them against humans, the boundary between victim and threat begins to disappear. Nature is no longer something outside of us; it is responding to what we have done to it.
Ultimately, I’m interested in what it means to have two people in these two places, so geographically close together, yet so far away both culturally and politically. When the solider in the tower on the big island finally decides to intervene and help the woman on the small island, we are also forced to consider what the cost of the “white savior” mindset can be.
Due to the location in which this film is set, I plan to shoot on an LED volume here in Los Angeles, using a mix of 2D plates and 3D generated content. The aim is to create high realism while also allowing for world building.
I want the film to feel cold, tense, and intimate. Beneath the suspense, I hope there is a lingering sense of grief: for a community disappearing, for an ecosystem pushed beyond its limits, and for the possibility that by the time we are close enough to see what is happening, it may already be too late.
