
Newtok: The Water is Rising
Newtok sits on a delta where the Ninglick River meets the Bering Sea, and the ground under it is disappearing. Permafrost that once held the riverbank in place is thawing, and each summer the water takes another chunk of land, forcing the Yup'ik village to plan a full relocation before the town vanishes entirely. The film follows residents through flooded walkways, eroding banks, and the slow bureaucratic grind of moving an entire community to higher ground at Mertarvik, a few miles away. Interviews with families who have lived on this delta for generations show what gets weighed when a home becomes uninhabitable: subsistence hunting grounds, school buildings, gravesites, the practical question of where to put a new water system. Newtok has been cited for years as one of the first American towns forced to relocate because of coastal erosion tied to a warming climate, and the footage here treats that not as an abstraction but as a specific, ongoing move happening street by street.