Reflection

My film came from a place of frustration. This Spring, I noticed that many of my plants seemed to be wilting. It's a hobby I've had for years---tropical plant keeping---but as I sifted through their pots and felt oversaturated soil squeeze through my fingers, I knew that the increased rainfall we'd had throughout the year was the culprit. It was a strange feeling, seeing climate change directly affecting my hobbies. Instead of a vague, looming threat on the TV, it was tangible to me: I was seeing its affects firsthand. I could no longer continue to raise tropical plants, something I've poured my heart into for so long, because of the new excess of rain---which I had just learned was a direct result of increasing atmospheric temperatures. So I created a film to express my feelings. I chose to represent the loss of my hobby as the overarching narrative of the movie---grounding the more technical aspects of climate change in a human-centric and recognizable way. It can be easy to brush off climate change as "something that doesn't affect me right now", but it is not necessarily true. Even little things like plant-keeping, things that we hold on to for comfort, can be affected by the shifting climate. You don't have to live in a high-risk area or work in weather to see it happening. In the creation of the film, I wanted to broadcast this realization that I had over the Spring. It affects all of us. I hope my film will inspire other people of the younger generation to express their own stories about the climate. I hope it will shed light on some of the lesser talked-about aspects of climate change: the smaller things that are affected, like the plants around us. And I hope I can recruit others to the cause as well, helping each other to create movies and art that highlights some of these aspects. Film is inherently such a collaborative medium---and with a group of people who feel just as strongly as I do about climate change, I think we can make a difference.