‘Lowland Kids’ review: America’s first climate refugees prepare to leave their Louisiana home

Dir/scr: Sandra Winther. Denmark/USA. 2025. 99mins

The Louisiana bayou community of Isle de Jean Charles is a magical place, nestling among bountiful rivers, under honey-kissed sunsets. The pace of life is blissfully slow; the neighbourly bonds are unshakeable. But the Isle is on the frontline of an unfolding environmental catastrophe; now its remaining residents – among them orphaned siblings Howard and Juliette, and their wise, wheelchair-bound uncle Chris – are to become ’America’s First Climate Refugees’ in the first federally-funded mass relocation in the US. Shot over six years, the debut feature from Danish director Sandra Winther is a lyrical, luminous portrait of lives on the periphery and a story that seems destined, unfortunately, to become increasingly common for future generations.

A lyrical, luminous portrait of lives on the periphery

It’s an extremely accomplished first feature from New York-based Winther, who made a multi-award winning short film, also titled Lowland Kids, about the same subjects in 2019. Premiering in the Nordic:Dox competition strand at CPH:DOX, this is a picture that could, given a suitable push by distributors, go on to be a significant part of the awards conversation in the coming months. Darren Aronofsky’s name among the producer credits certainly won’t hurt its prospects.

The Isle de Jean Charles, a wetland environment whose inhabitants live, as Chris evocatively puts it, with “one foot on land, and one in the water”, is especially vulnerable to a combination of natural and man-made environmental factors. Its position, on the exposed edge of southern Louisiana, means that it has always been lashed by the hurricanes that sweep up from the tropics. But climate change has seen those storms gather force, and the devastating brute strength of Hurricane Ida in 2021, which decimates the stilted wooden houses and snaps telegraph poles like toothpicks, feels like a tipping point: the moment at which life on Isle de Jean Charles no longer seems viable.

Then there are the actions of the fossil fuel industry. Oil and gas are big business in this corner of Louisiana. But since the bayou topography makes bridge building impractical, the oil and gas companies have carved navigation canals through the wetlands. This permits the salt water to seep into the soil, poisoning many of the trees and further exposing the Isle to the violence of the winds. And, like lowland communities the world over, the residents of the Isle are at the mercy of rising sea levels. The Isle de Jean Charles has lost 98% of its land mass over the last 60 years.

All of which is alarming. But what makes this documentary so special is how intimately and persuasively it makes the case that the Isle de Jean Charles is so much more than a piece of land. Andrea Gavazzi’s striking cinematography brings a glowing Beasts Of The Southern Wild-style sense of enchantment to the lives of Howard and Juliette, aged 16 and 14 respectively when we first meet them. Inseparable following the addiction-related deaths of their parents, theirs is a life of rare freedom, joyous and semi-feral, and lived on and in the water.

The Indigenous community on the Isle – the people who live here are members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation – value family above all else. But family, for Isle folk, goes beyond blood bonds. “In south Louisiana there’s an unofficial rule,” says one silver-haired local. “If you’re my dad or my mother’s friend, you’re family, no matter what.” It’s this warmth and sense of mutual support, as much as the wide-open skies and the wild beauty of the place, that give the Isle its allure. The question that looms large in the hearts of Howard, Juliette and their uncle is whether the spirit and solidarity that distinguishes the Isle community can survive being shifted, wholesale, to a sterile strip of cheaply-constructed new builds on higher ground.