Life at 50C: Using Ice to Battle India’s Heat
Commissioned by BBC World Service
“If you think about climate emergency as an ongoing war, what are the weapons that we all try and find to fight it? This is a film that tells you how simple ideas and inspired measures can actually help the population protect themselves from this massive emergency.“
-News Features Award Jury
In India, another sweltering summer grips Ahmedabad, but Shakeela is offered a simple but life-changing way of cooling her home. Meanwhile in Delhi, Pappu escapes the heat by working in an ice factory. High in the mountains of Ladakh there’s ice in abundance, and it offers a new solution to a growing problem. But as the country heats, traditional cooling methods are shunned: Indians are getting richer and they’re buying more fridges – which only makes global heating worse.
Biography
Surabhi Tandon is a freelance video journalist based in Goa, India. She graduated from the London School of Economics in 2009 with an MSc in International Development. Largely self-taught, she has worked for over a decade as a video journalist with various international channels – making news, and documentaries covering South Asia, and the United States. Between 2013 and 2017 – she was the chief English Correspondent for France24 in South Asia, where she covered current affairs and special reports; Surabhi was the lead reporter during the Nepal Earthquake of 2015 and for the American Presidential Elections of 2016 from Florida.
In April and May 2021, she reported for both VICE and Al Jazeera from the field on the second wave of the Covid crisis in India. Following this, Surabhi began work on Life at 50c. Recently Surabhi co-founded MIYA BIWI, a production house that focuses on surrealist narratives for fiction and commercial shorts.