GFC On the Road has launched a new feature: sharing the voices of our grantee partners and extending grassroots knowledge globally through guest blogging. The following post is from Glenn Baker, the director of Easy like Water, GFC’s most recent film investment. The film tells the story of Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha (Village Self-Reliance), GFC’s grantee partner in Bangladesh that provides floating boat schools to children whose schools have been lost to erosion and climate change.

Washington, DC – Producer Steve Sapienza and I recently returned from Copenhagen, where we were shooting footage for Easy Like Water, as well as premiering the trailer to attendees of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP15. Mohammed Rezwan, the subject of our film and the founder of the Shidhulai boat schools, could not attend, but he was pleased we were helping to raise the visibility of his project.

COP15 was intense, inspiring, maddening, overwhelming, chaotic, and amazing, all at the same time! We did, after some effort, get full media credentials and were allowed into the conference, unlike many others who were turned away due to the huge volume of interest from the international press corps (3,000 were accredited, many more simply did not get in).

Inside, we met a group of 15 members of Bangladesh’s parliament, who at first seemed unaware of Shidhulai, but by the next day when we interviewed one of them, they announced a parliamentary delegation was going to visit the boat schools!

We also interviewed climatologist Dr. Atiq Rahman, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leading advocate for Bangladesh’s climate refugees and for the need to fund adaptation there. We had interviewed him in Dhaka last August and it was like seeing an old friend—he is very supportive of the film project and gave us a long interview, which we conducted in a hallway as hundreds of climate change negotiators strode by.

The Easy Like Water trailer played on a loop with lots of other programming at the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) booth, which 15,000 attendees passed on their way into the conference every day. UNEP also told us the trailer played on the “Climate Express” train from Brussels to Copenhagen to open the conference, which was packed with reporters.

We were only there for the first four days of the two-week conference, and I’m sure it became even more frenzied as it drew to a close and President Obama and other significant guests attended. (We noticed advance teams of American security experts casing the conference center and installing additional cameras and other security measures.) The protests were just ramping up, which would reach full pitch over the coming week as heads of state arrived. Meanwhile, much tamer “approved actions” took place throughout the massive Bella Conference Center, such as a youth flash dance calling for “climate action now!” and a group of placard-wielding green “aliens” from Avaaz.org chanting “Take me to your climate leader!”

Our filming for Easy Like Water has taken us to Bangladesh, Copenhagen, and Washington, as we track the story of climate change from its affect on people on the front lines to the centers of power that have yet to fully acknowledge its urgency. I hope the film will bring greater awareness to the dire situation that Bangladesh and other nations are facing as the rising waters threaten schools, families, and entire communities. As filmmakers, we feel it is critical to tell the story of how local innovators like Mohammed Rezwan are courageously leading the charge to adapt to the new reality of climate change while bringing opportunity and hope to their communities.