Nina Metz: What documentaries can tell us about this summer’s climate catastrophes
Late last month, the Pacific Northwest saw temperatures as high as 116 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to more than 100 heat-related deaths in Oregon alone. During roughly the same period, a tornado hit Chicago’s western suburbs. Earlier this week, parts of Florida were under a hurricane warning. And firefighters in California are currently tracking three major wildfires, with concerns that they may be worse than those causing the record-breaking destruction seen in 2020.
It’s been a summer of extreme weather events and we’re not even halfway through July. All of which compelled me to revisit the excellent documentary “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code,” which takes a closer look at the 1995 Chicago heat wave and the factors that led to the deaths of 739 people, most of whom resided on the city’s South and West Sides. The film doesn’t treat ’95 as an isolated incident, but as a key to understanding our reality going forward.
“People send me these articles from all over the country every day and say, ‘Oh my god, “Cooked” was so prescient,’” said the film’s director Judith Helfand earlier this week. “And COVID has made it even more clear, so painfully clear, who has resources and who gets hurt the worst: It’s the connection between ZIP code and race.”
I first wrote about the film (which you can rent or buy on Amazon and Google Play) when it came out in 2019. “Extreme weather reveals extreme inequity, extreme disparity, extreme racism and the long term impact of structural racism,” she said at the time. These days, she said, her focus is on “supporting this new movement that has really taken hold, which is reframing racism as a public health crisis. Over 200 jurisdictions across the United States have done that” — including Chicago just last month — “and what do I think that could mean? When you use language to reframe something, you have the capacity to not just change laws but change people’s minds and to help people see things through a different kind of lens.”
If you haven’t seen the film, I highly recommend it for its local focus — the devastation was just so massive, particularly for Black and Latinx people — but also for its careful analysis of how we got here.
Here’s one example: Prolonged high temperatures are taxing on everyone but more so in neighborhoods that lack tree canopies. A recent study found that “these disparities correlate closely with neighborhoods that were subject to decades of housing discrimination through federal redlining policies that prevented African Americans from buying homes in certain neighborhoods during the New Deal era,” according to a report in Bloomberg. Researchers found that 94% of the time, historically redlined neighborhoods were nearly 5 degrees warmer than non-redlined neighborhoods. In some cases, they were nearly 13 degrees warmer.
Documentaries can help us better understand what’s happening around us and “Fire in Paradise,” also from 2019, is also worth a look. The film, which is on Netflix, recounts the day in 2018 when a fast-moving wildfire leveled the small town of Paradise in Northern California. Almost 100 people died in that fire. Directors Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari take a deceptively straightforward approach — simply using first-person interviews and footage from the day — that is deeply upsetting but also moving, as the town’s residents describe what happened when they realized there was no time to evacuate.
“I just felt like you could hear the fear in these peoples’ voices and the desperation,” a 911 dispatcher remembers, “and you want to be there for them and you can’t. And then you have to tell them, ‘I have to go,’ because you have to take another call.”
But it’s fire captain Sean Norman who connects the dots between climate and the worsening threat of wildfires. “The part that’s affecting us the most is our weather,” he says, “and that’s what’s driving these fires. We’re setting records every year. Our humidity is lower. The fire’s burning as aggressively at night as it is during the day, so we don’t ever get that chance to get ahead of it. And the toll on our people is extreme.”
By the way, keep an eye out for the upcoming documentary “Bring Your Own Brigade” from filmmaker Lucy Walker, which premiered at Sundance this year and comes to Paramount+ in August. It follows the aftermath of the fire and includes interviews with Indigenous experts on fire suppression tactics. Variety’s film review from Sundance notes that “Walker’s willingness to have her certainties upended makes the documentary a welcome addition to the climate-change genre even as it challenges assumptions about wildfires and the warming of the planet.”
“Cooked” director Helfand mentioned another documentary that’s in the works from Katja Esson called “Razing Liberty Square.” It’s a film about climate gentrification in Miami, focusing on the historically Black neighborhood of Liberty City, which is located 10 feet above sea level.
Because it’s not on the shoreline, it’s an area that was considered less desirable and was therefore “ignored by developers and policymakers alike for generations,” per the film’s website. But with flooding now a worry for those with beachfront property, suddenly developers have set their sights on Liberty City. Concerns about displacement are real. Helfand has seen portions of the film. “I was impressed before, but now after the tragedy of the towers falling in Miami, this is a very important story that just became more dire and ever more prescient.”
She also highlighted one more work in progress, a documentary called “Against the Tide” from Indian director Sarvnik Kaur, who is part of a cohort of filmmakers that Helfand is mentoring. “It’s a tale of two fishermen,” Helfand said, “and the impact of climate change on their life, legacy, relationship and future.”
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