The Climate Museum offered a after-school workshop, “Climate Storytelling Through Filmmaking” to high school students. 

This workshop was presented as part of the New York Premiere of Hollow Tree, a documentary by director Kira Akerman. This film follows three teenagers coming of age in their sinking homeland of Louisiana. For the first time, they notice the Mississippi River’s engineering, stumps of cypress trees, and billowing smokestacks. Their different perspectives — as Indigenous, white, and Angolan young women — shape their story of the climate crisis.

In this workshop, students:

• Watched an excerpt from Hollow Tree.

• Heard from the film’s 3 protagonists.

• Connected with other climate-focused teens to tell their own climate story through film, learning to look differently at their environments. 

• Learned film storytelling techniques that can be adapted for social media.  

• Explored ideas raised by the film as well as in our new exhibition, THE END OF FOSSIL FUEL, including how the climate crisis is inextricably bound together with social inequality.

This workshop was be led by our Youth Programs Team and the Hollow Tree filmmakers.  

Screenings before the workshop were held at Museum of the Moving Image and DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema for Documentary Film.