Conditions are ripe for climapocalypse or cli-fi films
A slew of recent shows and films show the way for climate change fiction—India’s entry to Oscars 2024 is a case in point; Martin Scorcese’s new film is another
The second season of Nikhil Advani’s Mumbai Diaries, an eight-episode series set in the same government hospital in Mumbai where the first season was set, is as nuanced as onscreen climate fiction (cli-fi) gets. Cli-fi on screen is often an invasive, destructive or unsurmountable event.
Inspired by the July 26, 2005 deluge, Mumbai Diaries 2 takes off after a cataclysmic cloudburst grinds the city to a gridlock as water levels infiltrate cars, homes and neighbourhoods. The deluge is a foreboding canvas as we see burbling streams of rainwater enter the cracks of the decrepit hospital, but the show also goes into the hows and whys of climate change. A disastrous intervention on the rising Mithi River is a mammoth tragedy for a city and its residents. We are also made privy to the personal truths of its characters, the high and low moments of those lives in the crucial hours of a natural disaster, and transformations after close brushes with mortality.
Nikhil Advani, who has co-directed the series with Nikhil Gonsalves, suggests through the series that climate is bound up with everything else in our reality. We’re living in a world where climate change is real—the series has a disclaimer preceding the end credit which says exactly that—but there’s still romance, heartbreak, suffering and absurdity in the world, and the stories that contain the most effective messages about climate change are often focussed on human emotions and connections at stake. The disaster beating down outside the hospital is a catalyst for transformation.
Hollywood, which produces a prodigious number of cli-fi movies, usually treats climate change as a series of disastrous storms or events that tip the world over into apocalypse. The messaging is exaggerated to serve the dramatic or narrative purpose. Think The Day After Tomorrow (2004), possibly the highest-grossing cli-fi film ever—superstorms usher in an Ice Age, and humankind almost perishes.
Yet, now more than ever, is the time for the cli-fi genre. The publishing industry is already bullish about climate change narratives. In 2016, director Shyam Benegal, known for his socially engaged cinema, had said, “When we think of bringing the issue of climate change on-screen, the problem is how are we going to recover that amount. Unless there is a means, or you have a technique or a strategy -- both in the manner in which you deal with the content and the attraction that it might have for the audience -- it is not possible.”
Lavishly produced nature docs are a part of OTT cornucopia, many of which directly or indirectly deal with aspects of global warming and climate change. 2023 was the northern hemisphere’s hottest since global records began in 1880, this year has also already broken several records. Exceptional heat swept across much of the world this year, resulting in wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, even as South America, Japan, Europe, and the US experienced heatwaves. This record warmth was fuelled in part by high sea surface temperatures and continues a long-term trend of warming.
And still, as Leonardo Di Caprio’s scientist character in one of Netflix’s most-watched films of last year, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, says, exasperated: “Why aren’t people terrified? What do we have to say? What do we have to do?” Don’t Look Up, which also has Meryle Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in the other lead roles, is a scream of a warning about doomsday and a sharp satire on the everyday experience of climate scientists.
More recently, in Killers of the Flower Moon, a Martin Scorsese directorial which releases in Indian theatres on October 20, DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, who marries a Native American Osage woman as part of a plan to acquire her oil rights. The role is aligned with DiCaprio’s campaigning concerns; he has consistently shown support for indigenous protests against fuel pipelines and land grabs in indigenous communities, among other environmental crises. Most of his movies have a message about the planet’s well-being or lack of it—something that also inspired Indian filmmaker Nilamadhab Panda, director of The Jengaburu Curse, which dropped on Sony Liv a couple of months ago and which has been called “India’s first cli-fi thriller series”.
DiCaprio has been a catalyst like none other as far as Hollywood goes. In a recent interview with Vogue, DiCaprio even suggested that these same ideas were behind a major rewrite of Killers of the Flower Moon, because the original script didn’t “feel like it got to the heart of [the issue]”.
Jude Anthony Joseph’s 2018: Everyone Is a Hero was selected as India’s entry to the Oscars 2024. The Malayalam film about the floods that devastated Kerala in 2018, is a high-pitched tribute to the common man—rarely any women—who saved lives during that time. I met him before he left for Los Angeles to see through the publicity run of his film among juries and influencers, and found him to be of tempered enthusiasm. He talked about the film like he had no choice but to make it. “The floods were very personal to me. My family home is near the Kochi airport. With great difficulty, I moved my entire family to a safe place. We lost a lot, and it was long before we could pick up our lives again. That trauma is still there, affecting our lives. So yes, climate change is here, omnipresent,” Joseph said.
At Vaikom, Kerala, his production designer built a village and it was filmed largely during natural rains. 2018, available to stream on Sony Liv, unfolds like a typical cli-fi film—the filmmaker is as invested in showing the fury of gushing dam waters as he is in showing victims helpless, crying for help. High on melodrama, if the film wins the International Feature Film top prize, it will be because of its overt cli-fi messaging.
Similarly, The Jengaburu Curse is a powerful premise that gets lost in execution, but its climate messaging is forceful. A smart, hardworking software engineer played by Maria Abdullah returns to her hometown Bhubaneswar when she hears that her activist father, known for speaking up against mining in Odisha’s lands long inhabited by tribal communities, has gone missing. She faces an uphill battle trying to find her father. Like in Joseph’s film, Panda’s intent and idea are bigger than the narrative’s ability to sustain the viewer’s interest over seven episodes, but The Jengaburu Curse is another important addition to the slow swell of this genre among Indian filmmakers.
Panda’s first OTT series comes after what he calls his “water trilogy”— Kaun Kitne Paani Mein (2015) set in the extreme droughts of Kalahandi, Odisha; Kadvi Hawa (2017), again on extreme weather conditions and their impact on human decisions and Kalira Atita (2020), a visually-stirring, mostly dialogue-free Odiya language film about a man’s return to his village under a deluge—all made with the helicopter belief that human beings are solely responsible for wounding the planet.
Speaking over the phone from the US, Panda said that his upbringing in a farmer family in western Odisha fashioned him to be the filmmaker he is. “My childhood was self-sufficient. Your family grows almost everything. Now that dependence is almost non-existent. The whole idea of coexistence or the perfect ecosystem has been disturbed. It has affected me a lot, and after the water trilogy, I wanted to tackle the subject of greed that has resulted in so much of disruption in nature.” In the series, greed turns into a curse.
Panda emphasised that making any films without a star is hard in India and that his struggle to find funding for his stories, most of which somewhat relate to our relationship with the natural environment, has continued over several years now. Both Panda and Joseph say that indie cli-fi is harder to make than star-led projects. Last year, in Abhishek Sharma’s Ram Setu, Akshay Kumar played an atheist archaeologist who has a change of heart—and in his grey cells—when he realises that a naturally-formed bridge called Ram Setu mentioned in the Ramayana indeed exists and needs to be saved from getting submerged. This is the closest big Bollywood has gone to cli-fi.
Across the world, and in India, documentary filmmakers have been primary chroniclers of the ravages to Earth’s elements. But it was only in March, that the first Urban Climate Film Festival was organised in four cities starting with Kolkata. The National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) chose to do this to “dejargonise” the issue, said its director Hitesh Vaidya. “To combat climate change and decarbonise, there is a need to “dejargonise”. The language of climate action has to become the language of cities. If pictures speak a thousand words, films speak a million words. This is why a film festival is great for communicating with people across generations.”
Jacaranda Tales, a newly instituted annual film festival in Bengaluru, chose climate resilience as the theme for its second iteration which ended on October 10. The festival showed 20 films, again from the world over, including Pushed Up the Mountain, a French production directed by Julia Haslett, and two Indian Oscar entries—Nirmal Chander’s Moti Bagh, about the plight of an Uttarakhand farmer, and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, a meta-narrative about the interconnectedness of all life forms, both of which competed for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2019 and 2022 respectively.
After winning a special Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, Sarvnik Kaur’s documentary feature Against The Tide makes its South Asia premiere at Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2023 (October 27 to 5 November) in the South Asia Competition Section. The 97-minute film in Koli, Marathi, Hindi language is about two friends, both from Koli fishermen families in Mumbai. A dying sea drives them to abject desperation and their friendship begins to disintegrate.
The kind of storytelling that drives Mumbai Diaries 2 is predictably the future of fiction storytelling in this genre. The harrowing, CG-heavy apocalypse dramas aren’t probably the ones that emotionally move audiences to action. Usually, it’s fear that most cli-fi movies evoke—and we love to forget fear. Hollywood experiments like Don’t Look Up and the futuristic Apple TV original, Extrapolations, show different ways to get a sense of the new and uncharted climate era we have entered. Extrapolations also prove that the climate crisis can be entertaining: Meryl Streep and Sienna Miller talk with a whale in it.
Climate increasingly shows up as indexes of authenticity as Gen Z characters evolve in OTT content: In 2019, The Affair’s fifth season skipped forward 30 years to show the child of the two protagonists as a climate scientist. The same year, Big Little Lies’ second season had a memorable sub-plot in which Laura Dern’s onscreen daughter faints after learning about climate change at school. A group of US-based storytellers, climate experts, journalists, artists, researchers, and writers have gotten together to form the Good Energy Playbook—a repository of original idea pitches, situations and characters that can be worked into films of tomorrow. Its founder Anna Jane Joyner says that her goal is for 50% of scripts in America to include climate change references by 2030—“anything from brief moments to plot drivers”.
So far, there’s no news or rumours about a big mainstream cli-fi title. Perhaps we can throw in an idea? Shah Rukh Khan as climate change vigilante—a jal-vaayu yoddha?
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and critic
