Australian documentary Floodland uncovers human toll of 2022 Lismore floods
Floodland, a documentary about the aftermath of the 2022 Lismore floods, won a $40,000 prize last year. (Pictured: Eli Roth in his backyard.) (Supplied: Bonsai)
On February 28, 2022, Lismore experienced catastrophic floods — the highest flood level on record, peaking at 14.4 metres — inundating people's homes and leaving some stranded on their roofs.
In late March that same year, the town in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales flooded again, with the Wilsons River reaching 11.4 metres.
That made two "once-in-a-generation" floods in the space of just a month.
The story of Lismore rebuilding after those floods is movingly captured in a new documentary, Floodland, released this week,
Directed by Jordan Giusti, the movie follows Lismore residents Eli Roth, Harper Dalton, Bundjalung-Yiman woman Carlie Atkinson and more as they try to come up with a path forward for the town they love.
Filmed across eight trips Giusti made to Lismore over three years, Floodland premiered at Sydney Film Festival in 2025, where it won the $40,000 Sustainable Future Award, for a movie that increases knowledge and awareness of climate change.
But for Giusti, what's been most meaningful about making the documentary isn't the money, but the relationships he formed with the people of Lismore.
"I developed such a close relationship with all the main participants in the film that it's very difficult to watch it now," he says.
"I still cry watching it, and it's because I know them so well. To see them again in that place is very difficult for me."
Speaking to Four Corners in July 2022, Roth was adamant about remaining in Lismore, despite the post-traumatic stress he suffered from watching the "carnage" of the floods from his roof.
"I've never met a stronger community in my life," he said, "I was born and raised here. So that's exactly why I want to stay."
Throughout Floodland, Roth eventually makes the heart-wrenching decision to leave.
Dalton, meanwhile, turns to politics and activism, looking for practical solutions. He was elected to Lismore City Council in October 2024.
Atkinson and Bundjalung Elder Uncle Roy Gordon remind viewers about the lessons Indigenous peoples shared about how to live on or near a flood plain — and that they were never heeded.
Atkinson (pictured with Gordon) is a social worker and expert in culturally informed trauma-integrated healing in Indigenous communities. (Supplied: Bonsai)
But Giusti didn't approach the documentary knowing what types of people he wanted to interview and the exact story he wanted to tell.
Instead, he met people organically — his subjects would introduce him to other people, or residents would approach him when they saw him with a camera.
"We had a lot we wanted to say, and the people we ended up landing on as participants embodied a lot of these different themes," Giusti says.
Those themes were the political, environmental and historical realities of flood-prone Lismore.
"Our hope was that everyone would feel represented by just a few people, because they were hitting so many different things," Giusti says.
An outsider perspective
Giusti brought an outsider's eye to the story in Floodland — and a commitment to bring the struggles of Lismore and its residents to the rest of Australia.
"I think it would have been very difficult to make if I was from Lismore," he says.
"If I had been through what they had been through then it would have been almost impossible sometimes to sit through some of the interviews."
Instead, he said he was able to be a "conduit for people who've been through something awful".
In Floodland, Dalton speaks about "disaster capitalism", where investors profit from cheap property prices in Lismore. (Supplied: Bonsai)
His commitment to telling the story stemmed from his first visit to Lismore, his then-girlfriend's hometown, in 2021.
That December, Giusti said it felt like Lismore was back up and running after the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2017 flood, where the river reached 11.6 metres.
"I got a glimpse into a town that was thriving," he says.
"I really loved it. I was joking about moving there — that's how taken I was by Lismore."
Giusti returned to Lismore in early April, as the city was clearing the damage from the 2022 floods and starting to rebuild.
"It was a completely different place," he says, "It was really shocking.
"That was really where the film started: seeing it up close. I couldn't have imagined how bad it was."
He started to have conversations with locals about Lismore's history of flooding and its future, including the stories of settlers ignoring the advice of Indigenous peoples and suggestions that the town be moved.
Realising he hadn't seen those viewpoints in the media since the floods, Giusti resolved to return with a small crew — just a cinematographer and sound recordist — to talk on camera to the people he had met.
"They were surprised that I came back," he says, "And the rest grew from there."
His resolve was strengthened when he returned to Melbourne and realised people were "blissfully unaware" of the scale of the devastation in Lismore.
"While we're in the city, there are people who are without electricity in the middle of winter, in mould-infested houses that they have a mortgage on, and so on," he says.
"I wanted to bring that story to a wider audience."
Participants not subjects
When Giusti speaks about people like Roth, Dalton and Atkinson, he deliberately refers to them as "participants".
The choice of language gives them all a much more active role in making the movie.
"They're collaborators in a project," Giusti explains, "They're not a subject to be studied under a microscope.
"These are real people who are bringing their stories to screen and co-authoring that with you."
Giusti took a rough cut of the documentary back to the participants for feedback before he locked off the movie.
That means everything in the movie — including the rawest moments, like when Roth breaks down talking about moving away — is something Giusti and the participants felt comfortable sharing.
"Going into the premiere, you know there's nothing in there that's gonna surprise them, in terms of personal backstory," Giusti says.
The director would even show raw footage to the participants while he was shooting in Lismore to give them a sense of how the movie was going to look and how they were being portrayed.
"I wanted it to be about the participants and their stories and letting them guide whatever the film needed to be," Giusti says. (Pictured: Roth's partner Jess Shields and her son.) (Supplied: Bonsai)
It's something Giusti thinks is important to do when working with people who aren't familiar with the process of filmmaking — and it helps establish trust.
That foundation of trust — along with the small three-person crew — is what allowed Giusti to make a movie that feels vulnerable and intimate.
He says the key to establishing that trust is "just patience and not forcing anything and just following their lead as this person clearly wants to keep telling their story".
"It took a lot of commitment, but it was never a question," he says.
"That's the way to do it: just keep going back, keep checking in."
By bringing Roth, Dalton, Atkinson's deeply personal stories to the screen, Floodland exposes the human impact of climate change.
Since the 2022 floods, Lismore has flooded again, with the river reaching 9.31m in March 2025 due to Tropical Cyclone Alfred. (Supplied: Bonsai)
But it also shows how people and communities might draw upon Indigenous knowledges to adapt and be resilient to natural disasters.
"There was this tendency after the Industrial Revolution to think, 'We can just ignore nature, and transcend the need to understand nature by creating our own natural habitats of concrete and timber'," Giusti begins.
"I think climate change is like, 'No, you can't transcend nature'.
"It's bigger than us and that's sort of humbling. But how do you work with it?"
Floodland is in cinemas now.