Early in The Welcome Table (now on HBO Max), director Josh Fox asks, after showing footage of the U.S. constructing a wall at the Mexican border, “What’s the opposite of a wall?” The answer is right there in the title, literalized in this documentary, a table where he sits down with people from every continent who have been displaced by extreme drought, floods, and fires wrought by climate change. From there, the Oscar nominee for 2010 doc Gasland balances the macro and the micro, making broad statements about the state of the world while delving into the stories of individuals enduring displacement and/or forced migration.
The Gist: Right off the bat, Fox assembles a patchwork array of diverse voices, speaking over images of environmental destruction about human migration. It’s happened as long as people have existed, individuals searching for new homes, a better life. Climate change, Fox asserts, is about the prompt “the greatest mass migration in human history.” Meanwhile, governments are increasingly hostile toward immigrants, building detention centers and walls. He sets up the Welcome Table near Bywater Levee in New Orleans, drawing upon the city’s rich musical culture to punctuate stories with songs — and deliberately choosing this setting, since it’s considered the location of the first climate-change disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
One assertion the film makes: “Telling stories is healing.” That’s part of the thesis. And so survivors share what they endured, beginning with a young family whose home was destroyed in the 2018 fire in Paradise, California. They visit the wreckage that used to be their house, their community, their entire town. A woman from the U.S. Virgin Islands shows what remains of her home after a vicious hurricane, saying, “It was months before I realized I was homeless.” In Brazil, torrential rains caused mudslides that wiped out entire favelas, and now LGBTQ+ people face displacement on top of prejudice and poverty. They find some hope amidst the despair, thoug. They’ve faced enough adversity already, that they’re survivors; tough people primed to be activists, and we meet some who are helping their communities.
The sad stories continue, illustrating how foreign policy makes migrant suffering worse: Libyan people left to drown in the treacherous Mediterranean as they try to cross to Italy’s Calabrian Coast in overloaded rafts. Drought leading to starvation in Kenya. Oil companies denying they’re contaminating the water system in the Peruvian Amazon. Aboriginal Australians enduring “climate gentrification,” where governments and private companies declare land and homes inhabitable so they can be stripped of their resources — similar to what happened in New Orleans’ Treme district, where one musician states that he he no longer lives there despite writing a popular song about the place, then points out all the AirBnBs that line the streets.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The awareness started with An Inconvenient Truth; Virunga and Seaspiracy come to mind as similar activist films.
Performance Worth Watching: The array of musicians give additional life and color to Fox’s passionately conceptualized documentary (a cover of Radiohead’s “No Surprises” is particularly memorable).
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: The Welcome Table quickly establishes itself as much more ambitious than your typical talking-heads documentary. Detractors will likely broad-brush pigeonhole it as a progressive borders-are-bullshit op-ed, but Fox’s on-the-ground visits to all the previously mentioned locales render the film much more than a political missive. The individual stories he captures on camera — stitched together by his frequent voiceover — provide the type of granular detail that vividly illustrates the effects of environmental destruction on the human condition. People explain what happened to them, sure, but they also share the emotional impact of displacement, Fox rendering them inspiring portraits of perseverance. The film does their stories justice, deservedly so.
The director builds upon those stories to formulate deeper criticisms of political policy and, eventually, the idea of borders in general. Such is the takeaway from the segment set in Peru, where residents of the Amazon have no private property ownership and welcome others to their land, “even representatives of the government,” they say while laughing. It eventually leads to the people at the Welcome Table lamenting that governments think they can address climate change and its human impacts without first doing something about power imbalance, bigotry, injustice, and a variety of social ills.
At the midpoint of the doc, Fox uses a montage of graphics and images of devastation to illustrate an array of statistics about the rise of global temperature, the facts and studies and numbers flowing like angry poetry until they broaden into greater ideas, words, and images overlapping into a blur of noise. It’s a rather affecting means of illustrating the cascading effects of climate change, and capturing the sense of overwhelm we may likely feel about it. His use of phrases like “apocalyptic hell” tends to push The Welcome Table toward doomerism — a classic case of using extreme language to shake people out of complacency — but he wraps on a hopeful moment of community togetherness, with aerial images of a massively long version of the Welcome Table, surrounded by hundreds of singing people. If we believe in each other, the scene infers, maybe we’ll be okay.
Our Call: The politics of cruelty and capitalism are a big target, and Fox uses on-the-ground human stories within The Welcome Table as ammunition against such short-sightedness. Some will take issue with the film’s polemic tendencies and occasional self-righteous tone from its director, but Fox’s words and images render the doc occasionally powerful, and more frequently memorable. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
