This BAMPFA documentary series explores the unseen side of climate change 

From drought-stricken equatorial Kenya to the halls of power in the White House and the microscopic corners of the human body, the effects of climate change can be seen everywhere. Yet beyond the terrifying headlines and images of climate disaster we’ve grown all too accustomed to seeing, the stories behind our changing climate — of those who fueled it through political inaction, those working to study it, and those who bear the brunt of its effects — too often go ignored.Beginning this Sunday, February 2, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will present Climate Journalism on Screen, a film series highlighting a quartet of acclaimed documentaries exploring stories like these. It heralds an exciting new partnership between BAMPFA and the Graduate School of Journalism, whose faculty worked closely with the museum’s curatorial team to hand-select the films and assemble post-screening panels of distinguished scientists, journalists, and filmmakers to discuss them. It illustrates a longstanding and vital relationship between the university’s scholarly community and BAMPFA’s world-renowned film program, which has been deeply interwoven with the academic life of the campus for decades.To discuss how this cross-disciplinary partnership came together and what visitors can expect from the film series, UC Berkeley News spoke with BAMPFA’s Film Curatorial Associate Jeff Griffith-Perham, who co-curated the series with J School faculty Jason Spingarn-Koff and Jennifer Redfearn.BAMPFA Film Curatorial Associate Jeff Griffith-Perham.Courtesy of Kate MacKay
More than anything, we were looking for quality — movies that not only amplify ideas, but do so in an enriching and aesthetically compelling way, using the many tools filmmaking has to offer. As this is a global issue, we also wanted to present films from different parts of the world to better illustrate the impact. It worked out that each of the four documentaries selected take very different aesthetic approaches to their diverse subjects. Using only contemporaneous archival footage, The White House Effect is a forensic accounting of how the United States government arrived at a political consensus of cataclysmic inaction on climate change throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It’s an amazing document of how we got to where we are today. Nocturnes is an intimate and immersive portrait of a small team of researchers trekking ​​through the verdant Eastern Himalayas for a study of the local population of hawk moths. Through its pacing, Nocturnes really highlights the patience in the face of urgency, labor, and expertise needed for scientific study. Plastic People is a form of activist documentary, taking a long view of the human reliance on fossil-fuel derived plastics, but it also gets very personal, as plastics pollute our bodies. The Battle for Laikipia, made by a team including multiple School of Journalism graduates, is an epic, years-spanning on-the-ground account of drought, d