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Thank You For The Rain
****
Dir: Julia Dahr
With: Kisilu Musya
(Norway/UK/Kenya, 1hr 27 mins)
Issue-based docs are always a tough line to tread. There’s plenty of them out there, and most of them are perfectly fine, workable pieces of material that serve to highlight an issue or inform the public – they can feel important, without necessarily being ‘good’ films, or without being particularly in-depth. Thank You for the Rain is a worthwhile exception primarily because it lets its subject speak for itself.
The subject in this case, is Kisilu, a farmer from Kenya, and the film details his own personal fight against climate change, both as a local activist and on a wider scale elsewhere; his connection to the filmmaker Julia Dahr brings him exposure in a climate change conference in Oslo, and further on allows Kisilu to speak at the United Nations Paris climate change summit. Dahr, for her part, smartly gives Kisilu a camera, so he is able to record his thoughts as and when they come to him, rather than when Dahr is around – he tells his story rather than the filmmakers imposing their own on him.
There has of course, been a million and one documentaries on climate change. Amidst all the doomsday statistics about how much climate change is going to change our world, it can be hard to picture concretely how climate change effects people on a day-to-day basis. This is where Thank You for the Rain really finds its strength, by allowing its focus to be on Kisilu and his immediate community – the countryside surrounding him is predominantly farmland, and a mixture of droughts and the occasional sudden flood has laid waste to many people’s ability to subsist on farming. This is an excellent case of the micro telling the story of the macro.
We know that climate change is going to disproportionately effect people in developing countries, and Thank You for the Rain does an excellent job in depicting that – it is countries like Kenya who lack the pure resources to adapt to such drastic changes in our environment, whilst the pressure is on them to also use fossil fuels as a way of “catching up” to the Western nations (whose very development is of course down to that same use of fossil fuels and years of colonialist subjugation which has depleted resources wherever it has gone). Rocks and hard places come to mind.
Thank You for the Rain only briefly touches on this deeper fact, but to do would have taken the film away from its focus, which is to depict Kisilu’s journey. And he is a truly charismatic figure, full of passion but also capable of being bought low by his defeats.
In sticking with Thank You for the Rain, I believe the film hits upon a wider truth. As we watch Kisilu hoping to empower his fellow local farmers to make small changes to their methods that would benefit their farms in the long-term, one wonders whether the answer to climate change comes not from asking world leaders to hash out complex agreements (that are then rubbished by the next orange ape to turn up), but from community power and bottom-up changes. Excellent stuff. Fedor Tot
Thank You For The Rain screens as part of Gentle/Radical’s three-day symposium, Decolonising Environmentalism, which aims to bring together conversation about climate change, environmentalism, and how it effects marginalised communities.
Info: Sat 30 Jun – Sun 1 Jul. St. Helen’s Road Swansea (Sat 2-7pm), SKLP Samaj, Mardy St, Cardiff (Sun 2-7pm). Admission: £15/£10/£5 info: www.facebook.com/gentleradical/