By John Corrado

The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto

In The Here Now Project, co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel offer a portrait of increasingly severe weather conditions attributed to climate change, culled together from thousands of hours of videos shot by regular people over the course of 2021.

We see on-the-ground footage from the aftermath of the freak snowstorm in Texas that took out the state’s ill-prepared power grid, swarms of locusts in Kenya, subway flooding in China, the effects of hurricane Ida in New York, and the alarming rise in forest fires raging around the world (including stressful body cam footage shot by a smokejumper).

Regardless of how you feel about the format going in, with the film essentially being made up of random people’s cell phone videos, The Here Now Project is often surprisingly engaging. If it maybe gets a little too preachy at the end with the subjects providing messages over the end credits, the images are more than powerful enough to speak for themselves. The film unfolds at times like a found footage disaster movie, with these compelling snippets of people experiencing extreme weather conditions edited together into a cohesive, real-life portrait of a changing climate.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

The Here Now Project screens as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.