Haulout (2022)

I am doing some posts this year on some of the Oscar nominated shorts that I especially liked, and this is one of them. This is a sad story, when all is said and done, but it's captured so beautifully that it is hypnotic to watch. The title is a reference to the process known as "haulout", during which various sea mammals emerge from the water and spend time resting on rocks, beaches, and ice. This short film follows one man who is in a small wooden hut up in the Siberian Arctic to observe and mark the crisis that is happening. It is in Russian, but there is almost no narration, so while there are subtitles, there is not much reading. He's living up there studying the walruses and their annual haulout. Unfortunately this mean he witnesses first hand the chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses. These poor creatures end up stuffed, without an extra square inch between any of them, on this beach. It's awful. For the record, this is new – usually they rest on sea ice or icebergs. But there is none left due to climate change. So there are 100,000 of them on this tiny spit of land, exhausted and hungry, some of them dying. This is where we humans have left them.