Superman could leap a tall building in a single bound. That ain’t nothing compared to Josh Fox. Fox created the anti-fracking movement in a single movie, Gasland.
Until Josh showed up in Pennsylvania with a little point-and-shoot camera, no one knew what the hell hydraulic fracturing was. Then Fox filmed a neighbor lighting up the tap water with a match.
In his new film, The Welcome Table, which is having its premiere run on HBO right now, Fox has traded in his point-and-shoot with lush cinematography on five — count them: five! — continents. (Makes you wonder what you’re doing with your own life.)
But it ain’t some travelogue for the Discovery Channel. Fox has brilliantly, astonishingly, melded the burning issues of immigration and climate change. Even if you just think global warming is a bunch of hot air (pun intended), this documentary will just knock you out.
Continent by continent, Josh takes you to meet some of the most interesting characters you’ll see on celluloid. He goes to Brazil to find a favela, one of those cardboard-and-tin-roofed villages, that had been washed away in a landslide; a landslide caused by torrential rain, undoubtedly the effect of runaway climate.
He found a community of transgender people who had moved into this favela to get away from gender terrorism in their Catholic homes. Far from avoiding the Lord’s wrath, they got their asses kicked by an angry Mother Earth who was not happy at the destruction of her Amazon. So, these Brazilians look to the United States for asylum. Good luck with that. I won’t give away the ending.
Then Fox is off to Australia where aboriginal people were literally washed away by fire and water. These poor people were lied to — of course, they were — and they paid the price in bodies face down in the flood. I was screaming at the screen, “This is just like New Orleans in Katrina!” Fox didn’t miss the terrible parallel. Josh lives in New Orleans, and the film begins and ends on a levee, the hump of earth that was supposed to protect the city, but didn’t.
And the Bush White House knew the New Orleans levees wouldn’t hold. (Here I have to plug my own film, All Washed Away. It’s short, so I’d watch it like coming attractions before you check into Fox’s film.)
You may ignore the title of Josh’s doc, The Welcome Table, which sounds like something you can order off the Williams Sonoma catalog. But in Josh’s case, it’s literally a table set for 1000 people, refugees of Australian and Brazilian floods, climate refugees from Paradise, California; from Africa, from Asia. They have joined with the local displaced, all joined by the cost they paid for weather gone wild caused by greed-poisoned, fossil-burning addicted industries.
Fox welcomes them to a meal together at this ridiculously long table. (In my conversation with Fox, which you can listen to here, hundreds all sit down to eat, but I observed that no food is served. I still don’t know if that was meant to be a metaphor for the broken promise to immigrants made by the Statue of Liberty, or if it was just a budget restriction from HBO. I can hear a network executive saying, “All we can afford is a juice box, a bag of potato chips and a bus ticket home.”)
Josh Fox lays out a place for the world at his table atop a levee in his home town of New Orleans.
Mussolini’s welcome
My favorite part of the flick was Fox’s return to his roots in Calabria, Italy. He lands on the beach, just like many African immigrants floating across the Mediterranean, to find his ancestral home, half empty, stores shuttered, houses abandoned because families like his fled to America to avoid starvation and fascism. The town is dying. But a couple of towns nearby are suddenly thriving, because they have welcomed the African immigrants to fill those storefronts, to rebuild those houses.
Fox lays on the irony as thickly as it must be. Italians like his own family we’re welcomed to America. Fox’s grandparents were “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” welcomed by a lamp beside the golden door. And now their relatives left in the Old Country are closing their doors under the unwelcoming scowl of Mussolini’s party back in power.
To me it was especially poignant, having read Fox’s astonishing script for the stage play, The Truth Has Changed [Seven Stories Press] which I heartily recommend you read. That’s where he explained that his Italian grandfather came to America, but never felt the welcome that we say we gave those, “yearning to breathe free.” And so his grandfather took his own life.
In other words, The Welcome Table is Fox’s own story. And ours. Unless you’re an Apache, you’re an immigrant. And don’t you forget it.
Solution? What do we do about the massed forced migration of literally hundreds of millions of people? Josh suggests we turn off the immigration creation machine: the man-made climate horror show. When our fellow humans are flooded out, why are we surprised when they float desperate to our shores?
Watch Greg Palast’s discussion with Josh Fox (see player below), and watch The Welcome Table, available now on HBO.
Josh Fox connects climate change with the wave of refugees. The Palast team then connects climate AND the attack on immigration to voting right. Every day, the Palast crew pulls on capes and tights and goes after the bad guys. And that takes moolah: for plane tickets, for Freedom of Information Data, for hidden cameras and cameras we put in their faces.
So, I’m asking you to JOIN MY SUBSTACK and make a monthly donation of $8. Or, simply click on over to our DonorBox and hit the monthly subscribe button for whatever you think we’re worth. I thank you for your continuing support.