Everyone who welcomes the seriousness of the climate crisis into their lives does it in a different way, but there are common patterns. For me, it was precipitated by a weeks-long period of research into climate science for work, creating a new intensity that physically manifested as a panic attack, my first time experiencing this. There are a few representations of such realizations/radicalizations in recent films. In First Reformed, there are scenes of Reverend Toller, his face lit by the computer screen at night, researching climate change, looking at many different websites and reports on his computer. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, we see one of the characters, Shawn, on his computer, doom-scrolling on Twitter. Fragments of despairing posts follow each other; his face, again, is lit by only the light of the screen. These characters’ growing awareness is represented by an amalgamation of images and texts that accrue over time. And, like these characters, many of us also put a name to the climate crisis, understand it systematically, through multiple sources and repeated exposure across the internet. It is a world that one can suddenly find themselves immersed in. 

When this happened to me seven years ago, I found myself deeply disappointed in cinema, even angry. Why did I not encounter more films about climate change? Why was there such a blind spot in contemporary filmmaking? Of course, I’ve seen many environmental films, impact- and action-oriented documentaries and disaster cli-fi films, but not many films spoke to the scale and immediacy of climate change itself. I started thinking: What would a climate cinema look like? 

“Climate cinema” is a vast question. I prefer the word “climate” rather than “ecological” or “environmental,” as it refers specifically to the reality of global heating and its effects. Whenever I attempt to create lists of climate films and climate genres, I come to the realization that there are just so many ways to address the issue. “What is climate cinema?”—not only is it a vast question, it’s also most probably the wrong question. There is no set definition of either “cinema” or “climate.” However, for me, the term relates to a need to build a canon of moving image work that deals with the future in a grounded, realistic and responsible way.

In his 2010 essay “Notes on the Media Crisis,” filmmaker Peter Watkins argues that the language of mass audiovisual media—filmic time, space and rhythm—has been standardized into an agitated and rapid editing logic over the past century and that this Monoform does not allow for insightful and reflexive communication. Maybe that explains why most climate cinema work currently finds funding and exhibition opportunities in the art world, which is faster to respond to the times, most likely due to the funding ecosystem and the interdisciplinary approach. New media work is also more receptive to the questions around climate change, as it is also a computational question: ecology as a system and climate change as a phenomenon seen through computational media and climate simulations.1 The film industry is slower, the budgets are bigger, the cinematic form is more standardized and there are many more stakeholders and gatekeepers. 

However, there have been more and more efforts to create, identify and show “climate cinema.” The past decade has seen feature-length films that directly take issue with climate change—in addition to First Reformed and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, see Women at War, The Hottest August, Afire and others. I find these films to have a more precise acknowledgment of our potentially pre-apocalyptic reality than most films dealing with the environment and ecology. There are also new organizations like Climate Story Labs, which is supporting filmmakers globally in developing films around climate change; Good Energy, which is pushing for more direct inclusion of climate change into films and TV series, and has partnered with Cinereach for the Climate Visibility project; and Cannes Film Festival’s short-lived section, Cinema for the Climate. BAFTA albert in the U.K. and PGA Green in the United States, among others, are working toward transitioning the industry to sustainable productions. The emerging academic field of ecomedia thinks and theorizes around media and the climate crisis.

Another new effort is Climate Film Festival NYC, whose first edition will take place from September 20th to 22nd. The organization has year-round programming and an annual festival, which coincides with Climate Week NYC, attracting climate professionals who work in climate tech, nonprofits, academia and government. 

For the founders of the festival, J. English Cook and Alec Turnbull, the definition of climate cinema is open ended. “There are films about ecosystems and natural disasters, but there are also films about changing lifeways, about the psychological and existential side of things. What are the ethical and existential implications of living in this time?” Turnbull says. For Cook, the term “climate” is different from “environmental” because, she says, it is “a notable shift away from early conservationism, acknowledging not just human influence on the environment, but also the reflection of that influence back on our own lifestyles.”

Cook also adds that “asking ‘what is climate cinema?’ is a complicated [question]. What isn’t climate cinema that is cinema?” A similar question is asked by Mark Bould in his book The Anthropocene Unconscious. Bould opposes the idea that there should be a separate climate fiction and argues that climate change is “the unconscious of the art and literature of our time,” that the stories of our time are “pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness.”2 Many films may be dealing with climate change without directly naming it: The Sharknado series includes depiction of extinction events and fantasies of geoengineering; Pacific Rim and monster films deal with the geological time of earth; The Dead Don’t Die conjures the idea of future climate
refugees.3

However, when films say “climate change” aloud, they take responsibility for their own project. That is important because many aspects of climate change can also have cinematic articulations: the new temporality it brings (a sense of futurelessness as well as a techno-scientific knowledge of the future), the psychology it creates (eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt, climate optimism, pre-traumatic stress), our way of knowing it (the climate simulations and their relation to computation), the future imaginaries, the resiliency, worldings. These aspects all bring new understandings and experiences of time and space, and time and space is the domain of cinema. How we encounter and experience climate change is waiting for cinematic languages to be developed. 

Cook brings up another important point: “Climate cinema is not only about how cinema can affect climate, but how climate affects cinema.” How do we change our methods of production and not only make the current processes greener, but rethink how we make films? How do we change our ways of distributing and watching films and not only make streaming carbon-neutral, but think of cinema as the commons? These are perhaps more important questions, and many small organizations are working toward them. Climate Film Festival NYC is one of them, aiming to create a community that includes filmmakers, artists, climate professionals and a broader audience where these questions are debated in length.

Among my notes, there is a quote from Peter Watkins’ above-mentioned essay “Notes on the Media Crisis.” Over his career, Watkins directed bold films imagining what cinema can be, such as the five-hour-long epic La Commune (Paris, 1871). He thought a lot about similar questions:

Filmmakers must be willing to let go, at least to some degree, of the power inherent in using the Monoform media. Cineastes, alternative distributors, owners of art-house cinemas, media academics must extend the debate beyond the production values or intellectual pleasures inherent in the films they show. A new terrain is possible: to enlarge the concept of creativity, the pleasure of producing a film, so that it involves the direct, critical participation of the public in ways that have not existed thus far.

In the world of climate communication, there is a common debate about how experts should communicate about climate change. The biggest rift is whether to communicate hope or fear. But it might be the wrong question. We might instead ask about a new creativity: new modes of production, new ways of communicating. And maybe that is not a climate cinema, but climate everything: climate architecture, climate literature, climate logistics, climate software, climate artificial intelligence—climate not as a field in itself but rather an attitude that runs through everything else.

Climate Film Festival NYC will have its first edition in New York City from September 20th to 22nd, 2024. For more information: climatefilmfest.com