SAVING TUVALU follows three young people reckoning with the reality that their homeland will disappear under rising seas in the very near future. Confronted with inevitable displacement, they become involved in digital preservation projects with the hope of uploading and transferring their culture and identity online.

When a multiplayer video game emerges as a ‘digital twin’ of Tuvalu — a utopian world where players restore their country through heroic quests for knowledge — our characters must decide whose stories, heritage and culture can and should be saved.

What begins as fantasy and promise of permanence, becomes an urgent and intimate record of a nation and its young people fighting to maintain their identity. Saving Tuvalu is a collaborative film, and an observational portrait of grief, imagination and collective memory that asks whether a digital world can protect what the ocean threatens to erase. What’s happening in Tuvalu is a warning about the reality that is coming for us all.

Photos: Government of Tuvalu: The First Digital Nation Campaign, Created by The Monkeys