Film Premiere | Climate Futures, Cities Past

Please join us for the film premiere of 6 original short films developed, shot, and edited by Assistant Professor Huma Gupta's Climate Futures, Cities Past workshop students on Thursday, May 11th in Room 1-190 from 4-7pm. 

Each film narrates climate stories from landscapes + places that have been deemed marginal, specifically showing how water scarcity, mining of copper, extraction of marble, urbanization of riverscapes, and shifting relations to the land across generations are experienced and addressed by resilient communities of miners, olive farmers, factory workers, shepherds, bedouin goat herders, boatmen, and potters. And each film, through either character-driven or more experimental storytelling approaches, helps the audience enter into the emotional landscape of a film-world where climate change is not necessarily presented through scientific discourses, statistical abstractions, or data visualizations, in order to support the ongoing societal reconfiguration we are all participants in that require sustained reminders that other ways of being are (and have been) possible.

The student-directors are Hajar alRifai ("Dear Granddaughter: Tales of Drought from Syria"), Maria Gabriela Carucci ("On the Edge of Land"), Yasmine El Alaoui ("Tameslouht: Liminal Greys"), Laura-India Garinois ("Unearthed: The Domestication of Marble"), Mahwish Khalil ("Ravi: Tales from a River"), and Sarine Vosgueritchian ("Looking for Pirdoudan: Future Archives of an Armenian Mining Town"). Their films are set in Nasib, Syria, Caggiano, Italy, Tameslouht, Morocco, Drama+Athens, Greece, Lahore, Pakistan, and Kajaran, Armenia, respectively. The films have been produced by Huma Gupta with executive producers Meitha alMazrooei and Mahwish Khalil and editing consultant Allyson Sherlock.