After Enduring Hurricane Milton, a Florida Director Shows Her Climate Film in Oakland

A screening at Oakland’s New Parkway next week, Cinematic Visions of a Climate Just World, isn’t alluding to some far-off future of potential climate disaster. When we connect by phone, filmmaker Shenny De Los Angeles and her family are sheltering in Kissimmee, Florida. They’re among the over 3 million households without power because of Hurricane Milton.

It’s the second major hurricane in two weeks to ravage De Los Angeles’ home state. At the end of September, Hurricane Helene killed over 200 people throughout the Southeastern U.S. and caused tens of billion dollars in structural damage.

De Los Angeles and co-director Amanda Morell will be in the Bay Area on Oct. 17 to show their new short film, hija de Florinda, about a Dominican woman who returns to her ancestors’ lands after they were destroyed by the effects of climate change.

“So to be going through it in real time right now, where we had to actually prepare in case our home was taken by Hurricane Milton, speaks volumes — even though it was a fictional story, it’s real life,” says De Los Angeles, adding that she and her family are safe. “I’m navigating it in real time.”

Shot in black and white among the mangrove trees of the Everglades, hija de Florinda is a poetic film in which a young woman learns about Indigenous practices of controlled burns from her grandmother, practices which are now being recognized as an essential part of the ecosystem in Florida and California alike.

The story deals with environmental racism in a state where terms like “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “climate change” have been struck from local laws and school textbooks. It draws from Afro-Indigenous rituals, and takes inspiration from the story of Mamá Tingó, a Dominican woman who fought for the rights of rural farmers and was killed defending her land in 1974. In the film, Mamá Tingó becomes a guardian whose presence links the ideas of protecting the land and protecting future generations.

For De Los Angeles, decades-old laws that suppressed controlled burns became a metaphor for social repression. “I see my grandmother suppressed. I see my mom suppressed,” she says. “And I thought about how if nature is asking us to embrace fire, how do we as Black and brown people embrace our anger, embrace our pain? That’s part of healing.”

Living in harmony with fire is also a key theme in the other short film playing at Cinematic Visions of a Climate Just World, Lily Xie’s Remembering Our Way Forward. (Xie, De Los Angeles and Morell were selected for the screening after winning the Center for Cultural Power’s Climate Woke filmmaker grant.) Xie, a Philadelphia-based animator, came to the Bay Area to capture how Movement Generation and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust returned 43 acres of land in Bay Miwok territory, or Contra Costa County, to Indigenous stewardship in 2023.

The stop-motion short, narrated by Movement Generation climate activists, is a storybook-like, optimistic piece about people trying to return to a reciprocal balance with the land after centuries of colonial domination. “I think artists could have a really big role in moving from more extractive relationships to land towards more regenerative relationships,” says Xie. “And a lot of that has to do with storytelling and narrative.”

East Coast hurricanes tearing apart communities, West Coast wildfires destroying towns and poisoning the air — each region of the U.S. is dealing with climate change-induced catastrophes. At Cinematic Visions of a Climate Just World, which also features panel discussions and a spoken-word performance by teenage Oakland climate activist Aniya Butler, there’s an opportunity to leave our regional silos and strategize around a global problem.

“There’s a lot of intersecting identities and dynamics that play with climate,” says Xie. “It’s often communities of color that are living in ‘sacrifice zones’ that are already at higher climate risk.”

‘Cinematic Visions of a Climate Just World: A Climate Woke Special Screening’ takes place at the New Parkway in Oakland on Oct. 17. Free with RSVP.