Slovak documentary filmmaker Tomáš Krupa expands the intimate focus of his previous feature, The Good Death, into the globe-spanning project We Have to Survive, which world-premiered in the Open Horizons strand of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. Krupa discusses the origins of the project, the challenges of filming in extreme environments and the long-term relationships he forged with the protagonists.

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Cineuropa: How do you go from a film about euthanasia, following a single person, to a globe-trotting project meeting communities on different continents?
Tomáš Krupa: In The Good Death, I explored ultimate freedom through voluntary assisted dying. After that experience, I felt the need to approach the opposite theme: the desire to live at all costs. When you commit to a film, you are committing years of your life to one vision. Six years ago, climate awareness dominated the public debate, but the discourse felt overwhelmingly depressing. I’m not an environmentalist or a climatologist, I’m a film director, so the only thing that made sense was to offer a different perspective. I wanted to find people already living in landscapes altered by the climate crisis – people forced to adapt. I chose this approach because I want to believe the world will not end. It is a bit of a “comical tragedy” that today we seem more afraid of destroying each other with atomic bombs than we do of nature destroying us.

The film is structured around four communities in very different environments. How did you arrive at this four-part geographic framework?
From the beginning, I knew I wanted the movie to be global in scope. I chose a four-part structure because heat, drought, desertification and flooding are the four dominant symptoms of climate change. The world also has four cardinal directions, so by building the film around four stories pointing in each direction, I wanted to create a kind of circle. It was important for me to include different cultures and economic realities, to avoid the impression that this is only a problem for distant or less-developed regions. It is already affecting Western societies and wealthy countries like the USA. The idea was to evoke the feeling that we are all part of the same circle, one planet, one future.

The project involved filming across some of the planet’s most challenging environments. What were the biggest obstacles?
I’m not an environmentalist or a scientist; I’m a director who has lived in cities my whole life and likes tech toys. I’ve barely even been camping. But seeing decades of environmental devastation, now compounded by the horror of war, is heartbreaking. Film is the only way I can respond. One of our protagonists said something very simple but true: “If you mess with nature, you mess with people.”

The footage is incredibly beautiful, often almost poetic. The horizons of sea, ice, sand and wind create the feeling that you’re travelling alongside us. It took six years to make, crossing deserts and oceans, so it was both a logistical challenge and the greatest adventure of my life. Each location had its own obstacles. In South Australia, we worked in extreme heat of up to 50°C, which meant filming for only a few hours a day so the crew and equipment could recover. In Greenland, everything depended on boats navigating through shifting ice sheets and melting icebergs. In Mongolia, we worked with a local production house that helped us reach remote desert communities. Crossing the country and sleeping in yurts under the stars was unforgettable.

The film deliberately avoids scientific explanations of climate change, and instead focuses on human experience and adaptation. From a storytelling perspective, how did you arrive at this decision?
I made a conscious choice not to focus on the scientific side of global warming. I didn’t want to analyse data or explain theories. Instead, I turned the lens on people living in these environments, who are trying to continue their lives despite a changing world. For me, adaptation is the central element of the story. Even in the biblical sense, the “apocalypse” doesn’t mean a final end, but a new beginning, sometimes a difficult one. The film offers a window into that possible future. The world is not ending; it is changing, and humanity will have to find new ways to survive and carry on.