Usually, when attending a major international film festival, one’s thoughts about the weather are limited to the question of what clothes to bring. For Cannes, you leave the fur double-breasted at home, for Venice, maybe pack something flowing or a pair of Bermuda shorts.
This year, it’s different.
An extreme summer heat wave has scorched Europe, with record temperatures set in London, Paris and Rome. Severe drought has contributed to wildfires in France, Portugal and Spain. In Asia, torrential rains led to flash floods in Seoul, Korea, where more than a dozen people drowned in their Parasite-style basement apartments. On August 13 in Valencia, Spain, one person was killed and 17 injured when a strong gust of wind collapsed a stage at the Medusa Music Festival. Climate science points to a future where such extremes will become more common and more severe as the planet warms.
So for a film industry rushing to return to personal festivals after the enforced break of the coronavirus pandemic, time is no longer a question of fashion. It has become an existential crisis.
When temperatures in parts of France topped 104 degrees Fahrenheit in June, local governments banned outdoor public events, including concerts and large public gatherings, a move that would have shut down any big festivals in the area. Elsewhere, extreme heat threatens the infrastructure any festival relies on. Trains across Britain were delayed or canceled as record temperatures threatened to close the tracks. London narrowly avoided a blackout after an electricity surge – driven by a spike in air-conditioning use during the summer heat wave – nearly shut down the city’s grid (London narrowly avoided collapse by the easy purchase of electricity, at the 5,000 percent mark, from Belgium).
“We all watch the news, we know what’s going on, but most of the movie business continues to act as if [the climate crisis] nothing,” said Julien Tricard, founder of médiaClub’Green in France, discussing the impact of climate change on the film industry. “But as the events of this summer have shown, Europe is on fire. The industry needs to rethink the way it does everything because this is the new normal now. “
So far, the severe weather has not disrupted the festive season. Cannes was successfully held – and comfortably – in late May, before the heat wave in Europe. Venice, which starts on August 31, and TIFF in Toronto, which starts on Sept. 8, seems to avoid the worst of the summer climate. Similarly, the weather for the later autumn festivals – San Sebastian, Zurich, Busan and London – is expected to be cooler, and calmer, than what happened from June to August.
But the trajectory and apparent increase in the pace of climate change are raising concerns that the next extreme weather event is coming. Probably sooner than expected.
“We were lucky this year that we didn’t have a heat wave; the maximum ambient temperature [86 degrees Fahrenheit],” said Evelyn Voigt-Müller, head of communications at the Munich Film Festival, which runs until July 1. “But the extreme weather has become a more serious issue. This is something we need to remember if we want to protect our guests for the future.
Toronto residents remember 2018, when heavy rains in August, less than a month before TIFF, caused flash flooding, with rivers flowing through Union Station and into Rogers Arena on the Front Street, a few blocks south of TIFF’s Bell Lightbox headquarters on King Street. If a deluge like that were to hit the Canadian city during TIFF’s opening weekend, it would wash away the festival’s red carpets and even keep Toronto’s devout moviegoers away from the theaters. .
A summer of extreme heat has led to water shortages across Italy, “affecting basic life support” in cities like Venice, according to Jane da Mosto, co-founder and executive director of the environmental group We Are Here Venice. “We take this heat wave as further confirmation that we are living in a climate emergency and that it is time to really respond,” he added.
Italy’s old town is ill-equipped to deal with extreme weather, da Mosto said, pointing to its decline, outdated infrastructure and lack of green space.
“I saw lines of people waiting for hours in the sweltering heat to board a vaporetto [water bus] no shade is provided [by the public transport service],” he said. “And visitors and residents are under the same sky. If it’s uncomfortably hot for residents, it’s very uncomfortable for visitors as well.
Festivals in Venice and many other European cities face an additional problem: Many of their cinemas, and some hotels or local houses used as Airbnbs by festival visitors, are not designed for in extreme heat, often without AC or other facilities.
“We are working closely with the national weather office and trying to plan and adjust as much as we can,” said Voigt-Müller at the Munich festival. “But in the end, we are really at the mercy of time. This year we moved our festival headquarters to a new location with a large outdoor tent. There is no way to cool that down. If hit [100 degrees F]that’s it.”
THR contacted nearly a dozen major film festivals for this article, and none had concrete plans to deal with the risk of extreme weather.
“We currently have some plans in place to deal with the issue,” the Busan International Film Festival (Oct. 6-15) noted in an email, saying it would “take time” to implement the “new agendas.” With the spread of COVID-19 in Korea, Busan said that preventing the spread of the virus has priority for this year’s festival. “However, this does not mean that we are not concerned about the impact of climate change and recent extreme weather events around the world,” the festival said. “At this stage, we are thinking about how to do it [the fact of] the climate emergency part of our long-term planning for the festival.”
Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)
Until now, the focus of festivals on climate change has been too long, with a concentration on reducing the use of energy and waste and limiting the carbon footprint of an event. Every major festival has a “green plan” that outlines how it wants to reduce or, through the purchase of CO₂ offsets or other measures, compensation for emissions resulting from travel, accommodation and general consumption which is an inevitable part of any great film. fest.
“We do whatever we can to respect the environment, from the recycled paper we print the programs on to providing bicycles to get around to offset emissions,” said Raphaël Brunschwig, managing director of Locarno Film Festival, which is climate neutral. activity since 2010 and last year began publishing an annual sustainability report, documenting progress toward its green goals.
“We have to focus on what we can control, regardless of the conditions around the world,” said Brunschwig, “and I think what film festivals can do, what’s in our power, is to raise awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis. and to promote and pay attention to films that do that.”
But there are steps that festivals can take today to help mitigate the worst effects of extreme heat and other extreme climates. After this hot summer, unions in the traditionally colder countries of Northern Europe are calling on employers to restructure the working day, taking their cues from approaches to the south, where warmer temperatures are the norm. Suggestions include taking a longer lunch or traditional Spanish siestas in the afternoon to avoid working during the hottest part of the day. Transplanted into the festival world, this could mean scheduling more screenings in the evening or early morning, when things are cooler, or removing black-tie requirements for galas to avoid heatstroke. on the red (hot) carpet.
“We have to think outside the box, to completely rethink how we do things, how we plan these events,” said Mathieu Delahousse, a co-founder of Eco Tournage, a consultancy that provides green solutions for production companies and the audiovisual industry. . “And we need to act now because the risk, and the cost, will only increase the longer we wait.”
Already, Delahousse said, insurance companies are recalculating the risks associated with climate change, taking into account everything from damage caused by extreme weather to medical costs arising from cases of heatstroke or dehydration at many public events.
“In the next five years there will be a big recalculation in terms of insurance, and policies will go up,” he said.
But despite the dire outlook, and climate science pointing to things getting worse before they get better, Delahousse is optimistic the film industry will find a way.
“If we take things seriously, this industry can be more adaptable, more flexible,” he said. “Look at the coronavirus. In six months, we have found new ways to do things that were unthinkable a year ago. Once we take the climate crisis as seriously as we did with the coronavirus, we can make a difference -o.
This story first appeared in the Aug. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
