Opinion | Dream Hampton: ‘The Flooding Eats Your Memories. It Destroys Them.’ - The New York Times
Opinion | Dream Hampton: ‘The Flooding Eats Your Memories. It Destroys Them.’ - The New York Times
What We’re Forced to Leave
Behind When It Floods
Dream Hampton explores water as
a force of harmony and devastation as climate
change affects her home city of Detroit.
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What We’re Forced to Leave Behind When It Floods
Dream Hampton explores water as a force of harmony and devastation as climate change affects her home city of Detroit.
Ms. Hampton is a filmmaker.
I love the way Joan Didion wrote about place and memory. The December she died, in 2021, grief had already lodged deep in my chest after I lost my beloved friend Greg Tate. It was hard to breathe, but harder to imagine returning to Harlem, where we’d spent afternoons that equaled years, writing, talking and walking.
I began making this short documentary earlier that year, unable to know we’d lose Didion, Tate and bell hooks, three writers who meant the world to me. This film is that quiet grief, but it is also a small healing. It’s a portrait of Detroit, of its abandoned neighborhoods and the canals affected by the climate crisis that are reclaiming the blocks I biked as a child.
This is a short film about loss and memory, the flooded Midwestern basements where we collect family ephemera. Basements are, of course, foundations. So much of what makes Detroit special are Black people, who are leaving for the suburbs. My city’s foundation is disappearing, and if I’m asked to talk about it publicly, I know to rightly invoke decades of neoliberal policies and brutal divestment. But when I’m home and moving through spaces that hold my deepest memories, I feel mournful.
The team who made this film is a small cadre, a unit of people who love Detroit and wanted to create a tiny piece of art that wasn’t expected to perform in any particular way. Like a river, “Freshwater” is meant to simply flow.
dream hampton is a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit.
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.