Olivia Rempel
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Olivia Rempel (BJ Honours with ESS, 2015) currently works from an office on the south coast of Norway, helping scientists share their work more effectively with the public.
“One of my personal goals is that I want there to be a better link between scientists and journalists,” says Olivia. “So many journalists, they’ll try and get in touch with scientists, and they’ll just get these out-of-office replies: ‘Oh, I’m gone forever,’ or like ‘I’m on a glacier, you can’t reach me for three months,’ or they’ll get back and get in touch with the researcher… and they’ll just send these blurry, terrible photos, or they won’t have any photos of their work or what they’re doing.”
Since September 2020, Olivia has worked as a digital video expert for GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian non-profit communications centre with a mission to communicate environmental science to policy makers. GRID-Arendal focuses on stories from within developing countries and parts of the Arctic, and their program themes include Polar and Climate, Marine Environment, Technology and Innovation, and Transboundary Governance and Environmental Crime.
Olivia shoots and produces videos, teaches media skills courses, and has been helping to grow the organization’s overall video and documentary capabilities. She has taught online seminars for polar scientists and a mini course at the Technical University of Denmark, all with the goal of helping researchers learn how to produce their own media and work more effectively with media specialists.
When it comes to the stories she wants to see from journalists, Olivia is keen to encourage a deeper exploration of important issues.
“There’s a different story every day that needs to be told. They’re constantly changing. But I think, in terms of type of stories, I think we need more nuance,” says Olivia. She points to the example of stories about mineral extraction projects, where the demand for electric car materials and a clean energy transition collides with protestors fighting mine proposals to save the local environment. Instead of asking challenging questions about the situation, the media may simply emphasize the conflict between the two sides.
“These are difficult conversations – the ethical considerations are very complex, very nuanced… and it’s really difficult to tell the stories in a way that doesn’t make a lot of enemies. But then the other thing that people don’t talk about is that, okay, what about recycling minerals? And what if we don’t have to make that choice? Is there a possibility to just reclaim already-mined minerals and make them into the new stuff? So then again, there is just so much complexity that doesn’t get told in the story of ‘oh, there’s a new mine that they’ve proposed over here, there’s a bunch of people protesting it,’ and that’s it.”
Originally from Abbotsford, BC, Olivia saw journalism as the perfect way to explore her wideranging interests, including sustainability, without having to limit herself to just one topic. After other students recommended Dalhousie’s interdisciplinary Environment, Sustainability and Society (ESS) courses to her, Olivia decided to combine ESS with a Journalism degree from the University of King’s College.
The broad range of courses she encountered as part of the ESS program appealed to her, and she cites an introductory oceanography course as being particularly impactful.
“That was my first actual science class in university,” says Olivia, noting how different the teaching style was compared to the first-year Foundation Year Program (a year-long humanities course) that she had completed at King's College. “The oceanography class was really, really interesting for me because I felt like I had such a better understanding of the ocean… and then it applied in so many other cases later on, in my undergrad and in my career, you know – if I’m trying to explain some sort of issue and it relates to the ocean, I have that basic understanding of how that system works.”
After completing an intensive documentary workshop in the final semester of her undergraduate degree, Olivia knew that film and documentary journalism was her medium of choice. She enrolled in the Master of Journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2016 to 2018.
In 2017, Olivia co-produced and directed the short documentary Arctic Greens with Craig Hickerson as a project for an environmental journalism class, exploring a hydroponics project in Greenland tackling food insecurity. The film eventually premiered at the 2019 Food Film Festival in New York – accompanied by hydroponic salads for audience members – and in 2021 Arctic Greens was named Best Student Documentary at the Close:Up Reykjavik Film Festival.
For her graduate thesis project, Olivia co-produced and directed The Blue Devil with classmate Nebiat Assefa Melles, originally from Ethiopia. Their 24-minute documentary explores the work of an Ethiopian community fighting to save Lake Tana, the country’s largest lake, from a destructive invasive plant species.
Although Olivia and Melles had initially developed separate thesis project proposals, school budget and capacity constraints meant it wasn’t practical for every thesis student to create their own individual film, and Melles’ proposal for The Blue Devil was one of the most expensive and logistically complicated projects.
“It reached a point where we had to figure out what would happen… she couldn’t film it alone and go all the way to Ethiopia, and it’s too expensive to send someone to take the time out of their production to go and help her and then also make their film,” says Olivia. “So when this story was on the cutting block, I said ‘No way… This project needs to happen,’ and I jumped on board, and we ended up producing it together, and it was such an incredible experience.”
The Blue Devil was awarded a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism award for Best Reporting on a Science or Environmental Subject. In 2019, it was screened at the San Diego Black Film Festival, Pan African Film Festival, Colorado Environmental Film Festival, Addis International Film Festival, and Montreal International Black Film Festival, receiving festival nominations for best foreign/diaspora film and best short documentary.
Someday, Olivia would like to create a feature-length film, but in the meantime her work with GRID-Arendal keeps her busy.
One of Olivia’s current projects for GRID-Arendal involves the ongoing ECOTIP initiative, which brings together multidisciplinary scientists from around the world to study ecosystem tipping points in the Arctic Ocean. This year, Olivia is joining their research cruise for about a month to document the scientists’ work. She will be gathering photos, conducting interviews, and creating a digital 360-degree tour of the ship for a planned interactive exhibition that will travel between universities.
“That’s probably the project I’m most excited about, but also nervous about,” says Olivia. “It’s a very long trip, working three weekends in a row – but I’m going to take a nice vacation after that!”
(June 2022)