A film about climate change disguised as a portrait of collective anxiety, “The Hottest August” presents an up-close and personal look at New Yorkers’ growing concerns over a variety of societal changes, from rising rents to marching white nationalists, during one sweltering month in 2017.
Raising the specter of our changing climate without ever mentioning it directly, the film is a different kind of climate change documentary — one that focuses on the very human experience of yearning for security in an increasingly uncertain world.
Weaving together interviews with individuals all over New York filmed over the course of the month of August 2017, award-winning filmmaker Brett Story holds up a mirror to a society contemplating its future survival.
Named one of the best films of 2019 by Rolling Stone, Variety, Slate, IndieWire, Paste Vulture, Vox and Vanity Fair among many others, "The Hottest August" premieres on INDEPENDENT LENS Monday, April 20, 2020.
In the summer of 2017, national tensions ran high. Headlines toggled between wildfires on one coast and hurricanes on the other, white supremacists carried out public marches, and mass shootings continued across the country.
Amid this instability, with the month of August shaping up to be one of the hottest on record, filmmaker and human geographer Brett Story set out to survey New Yorkers across the five boroughs on their thoughts about the future and how we will survive in it.
As the film quietly unfolds, a cross-section of citizens open up about their daily worries and distractions, touching on issues ranging from the natural disasters ravaging the country to rising rents and the high rates of homelessness, to mass shootings and white nationalists, to political corruption, economic crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and the then-recent election of President Trump.
In the vein of Story’s previous documentaries, like the award-winning “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” “The Hottest August” takes a hard look at its central issue by looking away from it.
Never mentioning the issue of climate change explicitly, the film creates a subtle negative space around the topic and challenges its viewers to connect overarching themes from conversations that at first glance may not appear related.
Hailed as “stunning” by Vanity Fair, “a cinematic gift, an intellectual challenge, an emotional adventure” by the New York Times, and “monumental” by Paste, the film was also a Critic’s Pick by both the New York Times and Variety.
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Credits:
Co-production support from ITVS through its Open Call Initiative, which supports projects through completion for broadcast on public television. Director / Producer: Brett Story. Producer: Danielle Varga. Editor: Nels Bangerter. Director of Photography: Derek Howard. Executive Producers: Maida Lynn, Sally Jo Fifer and Lois Vossen. Sound Designer: Ernst Karel. Composer: Troy Herion.
