For Dulce, the rite of passage of learning to swim might soon be her means of survival

In La Ensenada on Colombia’s Pacific coast, local women embark on regular downriver journeys to harvest shellfish from a nearby mangrove forest. This short documentary by the Peruvian filmmaker Guille Isa and the Colombian filmmaker Angello Faccini follows a local mother as she tries to teach her eight-year-old daughter, Dulce, to fend for herself in the water. With climate change bringing rising tides and erratic weather to the coast, Dulce’s swimming lessons are both a communal rite of passage and, increasingly, a matter of survival. With a subtle, evocative style, Dulce is a humanistic and resonant portrait of one of the vulnerable communities living at the knife’s edge of the climate crisis. Dulce was a favourite on the film festival circuit in 2019, screening at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and Palm Springs ShortFest, where it won Best Documentary.