The Reel World: One hot summer
It’s the record nobody wanted to break. This summer, NASA data analysis revealed that July 22, 2024, was the hottest day in recorded history. Extreme heat is our new reality.
Learn more about how rising temperatures and climate change affect our lives. These three thoughtful documentaries on a deadly Chicago heat wave, climate adaptation in Kansas, and climate change in New York offer different perspectives on our changing world.
Chicago 1995. As the July temperatures started to climb, people started to die. Seniors were too scared to open their windows. Poor people were without access to air conditioning. These were the people who died agonizing, lonely deaths, their bodies literally cooked by the lethal heat. A total of 739 people died in Chicago’s heat wave, but was this really a natural disaster when most of the fatalities were poor, Black people?
In Cooked: Survival By Zipcode, filmmaker Judith Helfand asks us to consider what is truly a disaster. All over America generous federal funds go toward disaster preparedness for hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes that might never happen. Meanwhile, right now all over America people suffer tremendously, die prematurely, because of racism and inequality. Isn’t that a disaster, too, Helfand asks?
With passion and a sly sense of humor, Helfland makes a convincing case that the slow, unfolding catastrophes of poverty and inequality deserve a disaster response too.
Record breaking temperatures out west. Early hurricanes in Texas. Wildfires in California. Climate change is in the news about many parts of the country, but how does a warming planet and extreme weather specifically affect Kansas and Kansans? The documentary Hot Times in the Heartland attempts to answer that question by interviewing climate experts throughout the state and visiting Kansas communities where climate mitigation is already taking place.
Narrated by Dave Kendall of Sunflower Journeys fame and with interviews by Rex Buchanan, this thoughtfully produced documentary presents an impressively wide-ranging number of topics. The viewer might expect segments on regenerative agriculture and wind energy in a documentary about Kansas, but glacier melt in Greenland and the Jewish concept of repairing the world? Yes, these varied subjects and many others are all tied back to Kansas.
Although Hot Times in the Heartland feels like an extended Sunflower Journeys episode rather than a cohesive documentary, there is a lot to be learned. I was impressed by the sensitively-produced segment on climate anxiety. I was heartened – heartened in the Heartland, I guess you could say! – by the number of smart, passionate Kansans working actively to adapt to and mitigate climate change.
It’s August in New York City. Dogs pant, sunbathers bake, beach goers frolic. As the month unfolds – a month with both the 2017 eclipse and “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesburg – filmmaker Brett Story asks ordinary New Yorkers a simple question: “How are you feeling about the future?” Their answers and Story’s arresting images blend in her documentary The Hottest August.
Story interviews a wide array of New Yorkers – from a proud union worker shouting down from his open window to a Zumba instructor and her husband sitting outside their garage. Many express anxieties about crime, lack of jobs, politics and housing. Yet the one thing not mentioned is climate change.
The camera, however, tells a different story. Window air conditioning units freckle apartment buildings. Houses damaged from Superstorm Sandy dot the coast. A water motif – from sprinklers to fountains to ponds – weaves throughout the film. And if that doesn’t convince you that this unusual documentary is about climate change, the voiceovers, narrated in existentially bleak tones, will leave no doubt in your mind.
