About the Series
Science on Screen: Watching the Weather
Block Cinema’s Spring 2026 Science on Screen series, Watching the Weather, invites audiences to a series of films and events that contemplate how both science and cinema offer tools for observing, understanding, and responding to atmospheric phenomena such as storms, floods, and climate change.
As our climate changes, extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common and severe, and the impacts of these events are expanding ever more widely across macro- and micro- scales. To create readiness, bolster resiliency, and explain change, scientists serve as communicators more than ever before, even as federal policy changes make it difficult to fund research and collect and share data. Storytellers look to cinema to connect local effects to global conditions and draw comparisons between past tragedies and present anxieties – but changes in the attention economy and arts funding have posed challenges for filmmakers and audiences alike.
The films in Watching the Weather reflect on cinema and science’s shared concerns about representation and observation in a contested, tempestuous present. Across a variety of cinematic modes, from artist cinema and boundary-pushing nonfiction to Hollywood blockbusters, Block Cinema’s Science on Screen programs validate the efforts of scientists and filmmakers who treat the climate crisis as a crisis of visibility.
This series will showcase thrilling and thought-provoking cinematic encounters with storms, tornadoes, typhoons, and floods through a range of documentary, narrative, and experimental selections from across film history. Introductions and post-film Q&As will pair guest filmmakers with chemists, sociologists of climate, historians, meteorologists, and storm chasers from Illinois and the greater Midwest. These conversations will address new technological developments in sensing and communicating changes in weather, questions of environmental justice and representation, the public health effects of extreme weather phenomena, and the challenges of preserving and archiving data in a changing climate.
Image credit: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS (2025)
Supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Sloan Foundation and the Coolidge Corner Cinema’s Science on Screen program, each of the screenings in the “Watching the Weather” series will feature extended introductions by scientists, historians, and scholars, who will shed light on the themes and histories depicted on screen.
An initiative of the COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE, with major support from the ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION.
