Title: The Weather Diaries: a personal journey into the impact of climate change [documentary film]
Researcher / film maker: Kathy Drayton
Supervisors: Dr. Jeremy Walker and Andrew Taylor
Kathy Drayton’s Doctor of Creative Arts project, feature documentary The Weather Diaries (2020, FanForceTV) has been nominated as a finalist in the Best Tertiary Documentary category of the ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Awards. Critically acclaimed, The Weather Diaries was also honoured with the opening night slot for the Environmental Film Festival of Australia (14th October, 2021).
The film follows the director’s daughter Imogen as she becomes a young adult in a world increasingly affected by global warming. The Weather Diaries sees temperatures rise, bushfires rage, and flying foxes die in record numbers, observing the impacts on Imogen as she pursues a musical career. Ruminating on our failure to understand the effects of climate change and its implications for future generations, this is a story both personal and political, examining the reality of living with climate anxiety against a backdrop of ignorance and apathy – a meditation on ecological grief, climate anxiety and intergenerational injustice. A contemplative home-grown documentary, musing on motherhood, climate anxiety, bat conservation, and what it means to be growing up and finding creative success in a world literally on fire.
“Independent, innovative women film directors in Australia have developed a special way of interweaving the too-often separated realms of the personal and the political. Kathy Drayton’s superb The Weather Diaries is a stunningly intimate chronicle of two simultaneous histories: one the one hand, the darkly cataclysmic effects of climate change and, on the other hand, the development of Drayton’s daughter, Imogen Jones, from child to adult. Special connections between these threads are drawn: the teenager’s alienation at school and her pursuit of personal musical expression as Lupa J is crossed with the chronicle of a peripatetic, menaced colony of flying foxes. The film balances, in a beautifully poetic way, optimism and pessimism, fear and hope, melancholia and illumination.”
- Adrian Martin, film critic at Screenhub.
You can watch the official trailer here: