Climate Is a Mother

“If my eyes shut, you can assume these trees will dry up one by one,” says an elderly farmer in the short film, Dear Granddaughter: Tales of Drought from Syria, which premiered last week at MIT. The words are spoken by student-director Hajar Alrifai’s own grandmother, who lives in the Syrian village of Nasib. At other points in the film, she describes the changes in the land resulting from intensifying drought and laments that younger generations don’t have the knowledge to care for an increasingly vulnerable land. She also playfully deflects the camera’s gaze, asking her kin, “Are you filming the horse? Are you done filming me, then?”

Alrifai wasn’t the only filmmaker on hand; Dear Granddaughter was one of six shorts to be screened at a graduate seminar organized by Huma Gupta. At the panel discussion that followed the screening, Alrifai spoke about the significance of intergenerational knowledge in building resilience to climate change. But she also reflected wistfully on her grandmother that seemed to touch everyone in the room. “I almost feel like she’s part of the landscape,” she said.