Filmmaking as a Classroom: A Documentary Practice for the Climate Crisis

Abstract:“Filmmaking as a Classroom: A Documentary Practice for the Climate Crisis” is about the making of the documentary Hollow Tree. The filmmaker invited three young women, who did not previously know each other, to learn with her and her filmmaking team, and their respective communities. Her idea was to use filmmaking as a classroom, and to try to develop a documentary practice for the climate crisis. The young people in the film begin to imagine Louisiana’s past—its history of slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and colonization—and, by extension, Louisiana’s future. The one that they will experience and help to shape.