Under The Scorching Sun (movie)
"The climate crisis is about the Global South’s present. Not the Global North’s future.” - Disha Ravi, a Climate activist from India. This statement was echoed in a recently conducted survey on climate change perception by Yale University where majority of Americans surveyed, were worried about climate change but could not explicitly point out how it impacted their daily life. In places like South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and tropical islands throughout the planet, the specter of climate change looms large in every day life with heat stress being the foremost risk.
Under The Scorching Sun, documents the plight of everyday workers in the Global South under the influence of extreme heat. The movie was filmed in Chennai, India in August 2023. Chennai, a major manufacturing and technology hub in India had a population of around 5.5 million in 1991. Today the city is home to nearly 11.2 million people, growing at a rate of 2% each year over the last 2 decades (the population density is around 28,000 people per square kilometer, about the same as New York City). Most of the Indian Metropolitan areas are poorly planned and are struggling to accommodate the ballooning migrant worker population. In a battle for space, these workers often work and live in environments that are subjected to unbearable conditions. The ambient heat index during the mid-summer months in Chennai average around 120 ˚F and on many occasions the wet bulb temperature reaches dangerously close to 95 ˚F - the maximum temperature that the body can regulate without shutting down.
Most of our characters are working class people, native to Chennai.
Watch the movie here- https://vimeo.com/989040824/c7803c58e8