Genre Documentary

Sky Islands (2020)

Item: Sky Islands
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — Sky Islands (2020)

Sky Islands is a short documentary from 2020, running to just six minutes, produced by Dreamcast Theater Solomon Islands and Nia Tero. It comes from a remarkable collaborative effort involving nine directors: Daniel Kakadi, Neil Nuia, Junior Patrick Kauha Makau, Edward Manuga, Regina Lepping, Jeremy Gwao, Mannar Levo, Georgianna Lepping, and Zahiyd Namo, all of them Indigenous members of the communities whose lives and land are being portrayed. That is, in itself, a fairly unusual arrangement for any film, let alone one of this length, and it gives the project a quality that outside-looking-in nature documentaries often lack. This is not a film about a place made by people who flew in for a few weeks. It is a film about a place made by the people who belong to it.

The subject is the mountain forest region of the Solomon Islands known locally as Sky Aelans, a cloud-wrapped highland landscape sitting above 400 metres. In 2018, a pledge was made to protect mountain regions at that altitude across the islands, but the threat to these forests has not gone away, and the Indigenous communities living within them remain their most consistent line of defence. The film situates itself squarely within that context, using the natural world of the Sky Aelans, its animals, its trees, its water, as a way of expressing what is at stake. For a sense of how cinema from this part of the world can carry both cultural weight and quiet beauty, it is worth looking at Vai, another film from the Solomon Islands that I have covered on the site. And if you are interested in the broader world of short documentary filmmaking from outside the mainstream, my review of Nom Tèw might also be worth a read.

With no prominent cast to speak of and a co-director credit spread across nine people, Sky Islands sits outside most of the usual frameworks we use to talk about film. It is a communal work, polished but modestly scaled, and its ambitions are tied to place and purpose rather than to the conventions of theatrical documentary. The music heard throughout is local to the islands, and the cinematography captures the forest and its inhabitants with a care that reflects genuine familiarity with the terrain. Whether six minutes is enough to do justice to all of that is, of course, a question worth asking.

A-Z World Movie Tour Solomon Islands https://vimeo.com/395848743 A 6 minute long documentary created by 9 indigenous tribespeople of the Solomon islands. We're provided a glimpse into their day to day lives in this pristine forest and their connection to the land, the plants and the animals. It's accompanied by some beautiful local music. Cinematography is great. Overall I really liked it. Could have been alot longer though.

That point about the length is one I keep coming back to. Six minutes is barely time to settle into a landscape, let alone feel the full weight of what is being protected and why. There is clearly more story here, more texture, more of those small daily rhythms that make a place feel real on screen. I would have happily sat with it for another twenty minutes at least. It joins a handful of short documentaries I have seen recently, including Next Goal Wins, that leave you wishing the filmmakers had been given a longer run. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a film is: I wanted more, and that is not a complaint so much as a compliment wearing different clothes.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2025-09-04

View on Letterboxd →

Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Sky Islands (2020) on YouTube

Related on Movies With Macca