“Heat is like a death sentence.”
The line, spoken by a Kuwait-based meteorologist in Jacqueline Zünd’s “Heat,” anchors a film that examines global warming not through explanation but through what the Swiss filmmaker describes as “a sensory experience.”
Premiering in the main competition at Visions du Réel, Switzerland’s leading documentary film festival, “Heat” immerses the viewer in environments where extreme temperatures are entirely reshaping the way people live and work, exposing stark inequalities as the wealthy retreat into air-conditioned worlds, leaving those who serve them to endure the extremes.
Shot across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Egypt, the film shifts between a handful of characters, including a delivery driver on 12-hour shifts in scorching urban landscapes, a Kenyan woman working in a Dubai ice lounge, a real estate agent who brings ice and food to stray cats, and the meteorologist who reflects on how daily life has changed as temperatures rise.
The film grew out of Zünd’s fiction feature “Don’t Let the Sun,” which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival last year. The two were developed in parallel, each feeding into the other.
“While researching my fiction film, I found so many interesting details about the subject that it felt like an invitation to make a documentary,” she tells Variety.
In “Don’t Let the Sun,” entire societies shift to living at night – an idea inspired by real working conditions in the Persian Gulf. “There are construction workers who already live at night because it’s too hot during the day,” she explains. “I pushed that idea further in my fiction work: what if our entire lives were reversed?”
Making the documentary, she says, she found that this imagined future is already taking shape. “I was writing about a dystopia,” she adds. “And then I found this dystopia in real life.”
Gaining access to these environments proved challenging, says Zünd, not only due to temperatures sometimes exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, but also because companies were reluctant to participate and filming conditions in the region are tightly controlled.
Filming was done with a minimal crew, sometimes without formal authorization, particularly when shooting inside the delivery driver’s shared accommodation.
This scene offers only a partial view, Zünd notes. “This one was actually a nice camp compared to the others – some are horrible places, where you have 10 to 15 men in one room without proper air.”
The shoot also drew attention from authorities. While filming in Dubai, members of the crew were briefly detained and questioned before being released. Zünd says they were not given any explanation for the questioning, which was treated as routine.
The film’s striking, highly stylized visual language was developed in collaboration with longtime collaborator, cinematographer Nicolai von Graevenitz. The goal, says Zünd, was for the viewer to “feel” the unbearable heat.
“I always want to translate states visually,” she says. “Not through text or dialogue, but through something physical with images and sound – like a cinematic mirage.”
Early footage shot in extreme temperatures failed to convey the sensation Zünd had experienced on location. “We were filming in 50 degrees, but it didn’t look hot at all,” she recalls.
That realization led her to focus more on sound early on in the edit. “The editor was working a lot on levels, on winds – ‘Does this sound hot or not?,’” she explains. “There are a lot of uncomfortable sounds and we had to make sure they were not too uncomfortable and wouldn’t drive the viewers out of the cinema theater,” she jokes.
Visual strategies also play a key role. The film opens with real mirages filmed near Aswan in Egypt, where atmospheric conditions produce optical distortions. Zünd sought out the location specifically. “I wanted to translate heat visually for the opening of the film – I wanted something powerful,” she says.
Later in the film, sequences shot on Super 8 introduce what she describes as a temporal shift. “It’s a nostalgia of the present,” she explains. “As if we are remembering today from the future.”
For Zünd, the decision to focus on sensation reflects her wish to engage with audiences suffering from climate fatigue. “People are tired of being told what’s happening,” she says. “So I wanted to approach it in a different way.”
“Heat” will premiere in the international competition at Visions du Réel on April 20. Produced by Louis Mataré for Lomotion AG in co-production with Zünd’s Real Film, the documentary is backed by ARTE and SFR (Swiss Radio and Television). Sales are handled by Taskovski Films.
Visions du Réel runs in Nyon until April 26.
