Hollow Tree

Hollow Tree

Co-Presented by the DC Environmental Film Festival

Hollow Tree follows three teenagers coming of age in their sinking homeland of Louisiana. For the first time, they notice the Mississippi River’s engineering, stumps of cypress trees, and billowing smokestacks. Their different perspectives — as Indigenous, white, and Angolan young women — shape their story of the climate crisis.

This film invites three young women, who did not previously know each other, to learn with the director and her filmmaking team, and their respective communities. They travel to different sites along the Mississippi River, where they engage in dialogue with engineers, activists, and Indigenous leaders. The idea was to use filmmaking as a classroom, and to develop a documentary practice for the climate crisis. As the director encourages the young people in her film to notice their surroundings, they begin to imagine Louisiana’s past — its history of slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and colonization — and, by extension, Louisiana’s future. The one that they will experience and help to shape

Post screening conversation with director Kira Akerman, moderated by environmentalist Susan Crawford.

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Kira Akerman is a documentary filmmaker and educator. Her film Hollow Tree won a Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival, and an award for Best Documentary at Chicago’s International Children’s Festival. Her work has been supported by the International Documentary Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sundance Institute, the Redford Center, and others. Kira received the 2019 PBS Wyncote Fellowship, the 2019 Sundance Talent Forum Fellowship, the 2020 Gotham Documentary Lab, and the 2021 Climate Story Lab. Her short films have been featured in The Atlantic, The Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, the Ford Foundation Gallery, the Camden International Film Festival, MOMA, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, and others. Kira has collaborated extensively with Ripple Effect, a New Orleans based water literacy educational nonprofit, and the former Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, an interdisciplinary, place-based institute that promotes the understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf South region. She is currently a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

• Dir. Kira Akerman | 2022 | United States | 74 min
• Documentary
• English

Susan Crawford is a nonresident scholar in the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A former professor at Harvard Law School teaching courses about climate adaptation and public leadership, Crawford is currently writing a book about the range of physical adaptation actions needed as rapid climate change accelerates, and the legal and financial reforms necessary to facilitate them. Her book Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm (2023) was named a Lillian Smith Book Award winner in 2024. She writes regularly about the intersection of climate change and finance on Substack (“Moving Day”), and is a frequent public speaker. 

Crawford’s writings weave current climate science, personal histories, and policy into compelling narratives. Her prior books include Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution–And Why America Might Miss It (2018), The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (with Stephen Goldsmith) (2017), and Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, (2013), as well as a number of op-eds and essays. A lawyer by training, she was a partner with WilmerHale (then known as Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering) in Washington, DC, before launching her academic career.