Midway Documentary: Paradise And The Pacific Garbage Patch

Midway is a visually stunning documentary project from Chris Jordan that reflects on the immense environmental impact of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a mammoth collection of waste located in the Pacific Ocean.

The MIDWAY film project is a powerful visual journey into the heart of an astonishingly symbolic environmental tragedy. On one of the remotest islands on our planet, tens of thousands of baby albatrosses lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch. Returning to the island over several years, our team is witnessing the cycles of life and death of these birds as a multi-layered metaphor for our times.

With photographer Chris Jordan as our guide, we walk through the fire of horror and grief, facing the immensity of this tragedy—and our own complicity—head on. And in this process, we find an unexpected route to a transformational experience of beauty, acceptance, and understanding.

We frame our story in the vividly gorgeous language of state-of-the-art high-definition digital cinematography, surrounded by millions of live birds in one of the world’s most beautiful natural sanctuaries. The viewer will experience stunning juxtapositions of beauty and horror, destruction and renewal, grief and joy, birth and death, coming out the other side with their heart broken open and their worldview shifted. Stepping outside the stylistic templates of traditional environmental or documentary films, MIDWAY will take viewers on a guided tour into the depths of their own spirits, delivering a profound message of reverence and love that is already reaching an audience of tens of millions of people around the world.

Currently raising funds through Kickstarter to support the completion of the flim, Jordan and his team focus specifically on the “magical” Midway Island. Located in the center of the Pacific Gyre, the island is populated with albatrosses which have been badly affected by the environmental disaster. As debris washes up on the island, Jordan works to document the plight of thousands of birds caught up in the man-made waste.

From Midway Island to the Gulf of Mexico, the birds are calling us to shift our relationship with the planet and ourselves. How can we pierce the protective walls of our hearts and open them up without shattering them? Can we lift the shroud of hopelessness, and embrace the difficult challenges ahead of us? Can art and media take us to new territories of acceptance, possibility, and action?

Currently in development, the film Midway is the story behind Chris Jordan’s Midway Journey, his heart-wrenching albatross images, and the conversations they are igniting about art, activism, and collective change.

Using spare narration and stunning imagery, Chris Jordan’s feature film Midway explores the plight of Laysan albatross plagued by the ingestion of our plastic trash. Both elegy and warning, the film explores the interconnectedness of species, with the albatross on Midway as a mirrror of our humanity.

Midway is a feature length film in production scheduled to premiere in late 2013.