The topic of climate change is pertinent in today’s world and has an evident impact on our daily lives, according to Alexia Cole, MCAS ’26.
“It’s November,” Cole said. “It’s super hot today.”
The Boston College Office of Global Education, McGillycuddy-Logue Fellows program, and EcoPledge hosted a film screening and discussion about climate change and intersectionality on Nov. 6, featuring Cole, Camila Besada, CSOM ’26, and Andrew Trinder, MCAS ’26.
The fellows presented Thank You for the Rain, a documentary that follows a Kenyan farmer examining the determinants of climate change. Cole explained that in selecting the film, the fellows aimed to examine how climate change disproportionately affects marginalized groups and communities.
“We picked this movie specifically because we wanted to discuss intersectionality with climate change,” Cole said. “You kind of see in the studies that marginalized communities and disenfranchised communities are disproportionately affected by climate change.”
The fellows alternated between playing segments of the film and facilitating follow-up discussions. The first clip introduces Kisilu Musya, a filmmaker who detailed the climate conflict occurring in Kenya using some of the footage he captured.
“The other season, we were crying, ‘‘No rain, no rain, no rain,’ and there was no rain,” Kisilu said in the documentary. “Now we are talking of a flood. Everything is being contradicted.”
In the rural Kenyan farmlands, the weather cycles between extended droughts and heavy floods, devastating the agriculture-dependent communities for income and sustenance, Cole said.
“Because their entire income comes from farming, the drought would deeply affect them,” Cole said. “Any amount of drought or changes in the weather or the climate is going to affect the kind of food that they can farm or can’t farm and their crops. Their livelihood is essentially completely dependent on the state of the climate.”
When Kisilu spoke in front of the UN during the Paris Agreement, his main concern was that cutting back on emissions was insufficient in mitigating climate change, Trinder said.
“The Paris Agreement was the biggest agreement we’ve made globally to basically mitigate climate change,” Trinder said. “And so basically what Kisilu was very worried about was … major countries like the United States and China, cutting back on their emissions is not enough. He thinks it’s irreversible, and they need to do even more.”
Besada argued that when former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the lack of consequence was suggestive of the weakness of the agreement.
“And that was one of the faults of it, I think that [Kisilu] was referring to,” Besada said. “You can be part of the agreement, but like at any point you could decide to not be committed to it. There was no consequence. So that’s what made it weak.”
Trinder described how the sound creation in the film emphasized the incoming storms and the complex emotions accompanying their arrival.
“The storms were very, very loud and aggressive,” Trinder said. “And obviously, like the video, when he takes individual videos, you can really tell and get, like, a snapshot of his life, and like his local community. You can see how much they were struggling.”
Cole said she appreciated how the film used the sky as a symbol throughout.
“I really loved how they focus on the sky a lot,” Cole said. “The idea that the sky is something they use as like a source of their livelihood, but it’s also something that is actively turning against them because of climate change.”
