Directed by Brett Story
Canada | 2019 | 94 mins |
Source: Grasshopper Films
TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE MAY 12
A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing? And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives.
“Critic’s Pick! Fascinating. A cinematic gift… an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.” ~ Glenn Kenny, The New York Times
“One of the Ten Best Films of the Year. A documentary about climate change like you’ve never seen before.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
You have 72 hours to view the film from the time you purchase your ticket. 50% of bookings revenue goes to VTIFF.
If you’d like to add a donation you can do so HERE. For each $8 donation you make after purchasing a ticket, we pledge to give a complimentary film ticket to an essential worker once we resume physical screenings.
Filmmaker’s statement:
Climate change films tend to be overwhelming – overwhelming in their scale of information
as well as scale of calamity. They also seem to hit one beat only, too often reducing the
environment to oceanic physics and wild landscapes. T he Hottest August offers a unique
rejoinder to the climate change fatigue currently dominating the social and media
landscape, because instead of asking whether or not climate change exists, it asks how are
we living with the burden of it? We point the camera not at the ice caps, but at ourselves. This
film offers a sideways glance at climate change and environmental futurity, offering
moments of humor, surreality and poignancy in its archive of the present.
About the Filmmaker
Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto whose films
have screened at festivals internationally, including the Viennale, True/False,
Oberhausen, It’s All True, and Dok Leipzig. Her 2016 feature documentary, The
Prison in Twelve Landscapes was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs
Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature
Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. The film was broadcast on PBS’s
Independent Lens in 2017. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of
Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at
Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral
Power across Neoliberal America , and her writing and criticism have been published
widely. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018
Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.