Climate change on a community scale
The effects of climate change are a daily reality in the Peruvian Andes, where glacial floods threaten and sources of clean water disappear. One community is fighting back.
SENTINELS is the story of people living with climate change in immediate, specific ways. As Andean glaciers melt, Lake Palcacocha expands and the countdown to a devastating glacial flood advances. Experts fear the lake’s natural dam will soon break, inundating the city of Huaraz downstream and putting 100,000 lives at risk. As the city races to prepare for the deluge and struggles to maintain clean water sources, ordinary people take extraordinary steps to save their community, their homes and their planet.
Saúl Luciano Lliuya, with the help of a German organization, is suing one of the world’s biggest carbon-emitting companies, RWE, for climate change damages to Huaraz and the surrounding region. His wife, Lidia, works tirelessly tending crops and caring for animals on land threatened by climate change. His children, Brandon and Gleysie, are coming of age in an environment where lives and livelihoods are at risk.
The film follows Saúl in his everyday life in the mountains of Peru, where he farms potatoes, herds his animals and guides mountaineering trips into the increasingly dangerous high-elevation world of ice and rock. We witness Saúl’s journey as the lawsuit moves through the German court system and he moves into the not-always-comfortable role of Climate Hero. Saúl is a modern person in a traditional society, grappling with his responsibilities to himself, his family, and his community.
SENTINELS paints a chilling, intimate portrait of a community faced with one of the most important global challenges of our time. For the people of Huaraz, Peru, the impacts of climate change are visceral, dramatic and immediate. This is their story — a story of climate peril, disaster politics, conflicts and egos, and the determination and perseverance of the human spirit to find the way forward.
With the help of legal organization Germanwatch, Saúl is suing one of the world’s biggest carbon-emitting companies, RWE, for climate change damages to Huaraz and the surrounding region. His wife Lidia works tirelessly tending crops and caring for animals on land that could soon be underwater. Teenage son Brandon is saddled with the ambitions that Saúl had for himself before he was thrust onto the international climate scene. Young daughter Glacie is coming of age in an environment where lives and livelihoods are at risk.
The film follows Saúl in his everyday life in the mountains of Peru, where he farms potatoes, herds his animals and guides mountaineering trips into the increasingly dangerous high elevation world of ice and rock. We witness Saúl’s journey as the lawsuit moves through the German court system and he moves into the not-always-comfortable role of Indigenous Climate Hero. Saúl is a modern person in a traditional society, grappling with his responsibilities to himself, his family, and his community.
SENTINELS paints a chilling, intimate portrait of a community faced with one of the most important global challenges of our time. For the people of Huaraz, Peru, the impacts of climate change are visceral, dramatic and immediate. This is their story — a story of climate peril, disaster politics, conflicts and egos, and the determination and perseverance of the human spirit to find the way forward.
FILMMAKERS
