Heat

Bluesky

Proof that fact can be more disturbing and just as dystopian as fiction comes in the form of the latest documentary Jacqueline Zünd which works perfectly as a companion piece to her 2025 fictional outing Don’t Let The Sun. That drama was set in a near future, where the climate crisis had become so extreme it forced residents to stay indoors through the daytime and conduct their lives, including the schooling of children, during the night. It was during the process of making Don’t Let The Sun that the Swiss director was inspired to make this documentary, which illustrates just how close to reality some of her speculative narrative was.

Heat is a brutal presence from the start as the dusty landscapes of the Persian Gulf are transformed into strange and alien spaces by a heat haze that fuzzes up objects into shimmering blobs that ripple under the beating sun. “Nobody listens,” is a repeated refrain of Kuwaiti meteorologist Essa Ramadan, who offers radio weather forecasts that talk of the temperatures pushing past the 50℃ mark and offer advice for keeping physically and emotionally cool.

Zünd’s film comes at extreme climate change from a human perspective, showing its impact on those who live in the region. On the one hand, the rich are able to conduct their lives in shopping malls that are sleek and cool temples to capitalism, ringed internally by running tracks, while at home they toss blocks of ice into swimming pools and think nothing of leaving the air conditioning running while they escape to cooler climes. On the other hand are migrant workers – many from African countries, which makes their talk of just how hot it feels to them hit home all the harder.

Among them is Sophy Njeri Jagnath, a Kenyan who became a teenage mum and who has left her young son back home as she tries to make money to give him the best life. Ironically, she togs up in winter gear for her job at a swanky ice bar, where the rich can come to chill out in every sense of the phrase. The situation is even worse for Francis Nansera, a Ugandan migrant who recollects spending days under the scorching sun on his delivery motorbike. His testimony illustrates how the worst capitalist impulses are at play with little consideration for the drivers’ health and wellbeing. “You feel like you are being cooked,” he says. Also present is Carina Bouali a UAE estate agent who has been so moved by the plight of the stray cats in the region that she lugs ice blocks and food into waste ground at night to help them survive. The parallels between them and Francis are all to real as we see him standing in a scrap of shade because, as he notes, many restaurateurs don’t allow drivers to wait inside.

Why Zünd chooses not to formally name all of her protagonists on screen – though she does so in press notes – is a mystery, since not doing so adds a level of impersonalisation that works against the intimacy of the testimony she gathers from them. Visually, however, she hits the spot with her framing, whether it is the sight of Francis – whose face is never revealed for good reason – riding through the searing heat, the buildings of the rich reflected in his motorbike visor as though he were in a science-fiction film or Sophy rubbing her hands to get warm after a shift in the freezer. Shot by Zünd’s regular collaborator Nikolai von Graevenitz, all the exteriors have a bleached, sand-blasted feel, in contrast with the constructed opulence of the malls inviting shoppers to “step into the outdoors”. The sound design from Oscar van Hoogevest involving an insect’s high pitched song married to an electro score from Marcel Vaid adds to the dystopian air. Zünd doesn’t just want to make us listen, she wants to make us feel the heat.

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