Film Professor Brenda Longfellow, award-winning filmmaker, writer and theorist, will present her most recent production, the 2008 feature-length documentary Weather Report as the centrepiece of the Faculty of Fine Arts Research Celebration today at noon in 1009 Technology Enhanced Learning Building.
As the world reels from a series of unprecedented weather events, it is clear that climate change is forcing a fundamental re-evaluation of our most basic assumptions about energy, progress and values. Weather Report, produced with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Film Board of Canada, looks at the dramatically evolving impacts and social implications of climate change. Travelling through North America, the Canadian Arctic, India and China, the film explores how the battle against climate change is implicated in the larger movement for sustainability and global justice.
Winner of the Sundance Channel’s Green Award and the Bronze Remi Award at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, Longfellow‘s film has earned high praise from climatologists, educators and others in the field.
"Weather Report is a beautifully filmed documentary that travels the globe and is one of the first films to put a human face on the myriad impacts of climate change. Highly recommended," said Professor Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University.
"Compelling footage and heart-wrenching…a visually appealing, up-to-date, and gripping documentary," said Kirk Smith and Audrey Barrett of the Global Health & Environment Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
Left: Brenda Longfellow
"Weather Report masterfully accomplishes something scientists have not been very good at – putting a real, human face on the consequences of global warming and the resulting climate change," said Cindy Parker, co-director of the Program on Global Sustainability & Health in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Longfellow will introduce her film and field questions after the screening.
Longfellow’s presentation replaces the Walter L. Gordon Lecture originally scheduled to take place at this time. The Walter L. Gordon Lecture, to be presented by architectural historian and visual arts Professor Shelley Hornstein, will be rescheduled to a later date.