Geography with Brett Story (THE HOTTEST AUGUST)

Climate change is an issue so broad and pervasive it is easy to abstract. It looms large over so many aspects of life it can feel less like a subject to explore, and more like a mood or a feeling, a doom permeating aspects of every story told in the 20th century. But instead of approaching it from a distance, or preparing a sanitized lecture, in her newest film The Hottest August, filmmaker and True/False alum Brett Story looks for the climate crisis’s many intersections, with labor, with capitalism, and the human psyche. Story is a geographer, and both Hottest August and her previous feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes explore their subject matter through place, and people’s relationships with the places they inhabit.