Festivals: Waiting for the Storms (2025) by François Delisle: Climate, Collapse & Fables of Resilience
- dailyentertainment95
- Sep 5
- 4 min read
Four Lives, One Planet in Peril
Waiting for the Storms (Le Temps) is an allegorical drama about ecological collapse told through four intimate and intersecting portraits:
Marie — a young mother crippled by eco-anxiety who channels her fears about her child’s future into uncompromising activism, a portrait of the generational pressure many parents feel in the face of climate chaos.
Terence — a displaced climate refugee whose harrowing personal testimony to strangers reveals both the vulnerability and resilience of those forced to leave everything behind.
McKenzie — a government security officer who abandons his bureaucratic role, choosing individual action and authenticity over hollow institutional responses.
Kira — a soldier who deserts the military, joining a nomadic tribe devoted to humanist principles, embodying an alternative to systems of violence.
Set against shifting landscapes and timelines, the film fuses realism with fable. It avoids disaster spectacle, instead focusing on how global crisis reshapes private lives and choices.
Why to Recommend This Film: Artful Climate Consciousness
Emotional over informational — Delisle bypasses statistics and policy debates, instead crafting a deeply personal and emotional meditation on ecological anxiety.
Auteur-driven cinema — The director took on nearly every creative role—writing, directing, shooting, editing, producing—ensuring coherence and intimacy of vision.
Visually immersive — The film is composed with stark, poetic imagery that blends natural landscapes with intimate close-ups of human fragility.
Independent courage — A bold, uncompromising work produced outside the commercial mainstream, rooted in Delisle’s long-standing commitment to independent Canadian cinema.
Topical urgency — Its release deliberately coincided with Earth Day in Quebec, underscoring its political and cultural significance.
Where to watch: (industry professionals): https://pro.festivalscope.com/film/waiting-for-the-storms
Link IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23559518/
What is the Trend Followed: Ecological Storytelling in Art Cinema
From spectacle to fable — Where Hollywood often treats climate change as disaster cinema, Delisle turns it into allegory and reflection.
Eco-anxiety as subject — Joins a new wave of films that address the psychological weight of environmental breakdown.
Transnational scope — With dialogue in French, English, and Russian, the film reflects how climate crisis transcends language and borders.
Director’s Vision: Feeling Climate Change, Not Just Knowing It
François Delisle has said he wanted to make audiences feel climate crisis rather than simply know about it. By using poetic structure, his film embodies anxiety, grief, and fragile hope. He resists neat resolutions, instead creating a cinematic experience that mirrors the uncertainty and weight of living in a destabilized world.
Themes: Collapse, Liberation, and Human Adaptation
Personal fear into activism — Marie’s story shows how private anxieties can evolve into collective action.
Displacement and voice — Terence’s testimony highlights the silenced yet vital narratives of climate refugees.
Escape from failed systems — McKenzie and Kira’s choices reflect a search for authenticity and humanity beyond institutions.
Survival as legacy — Across the stories runs a central question: what will we pass on to the next generation?
Key Success Factors: Emotion, Sensory Power, and Multilayered Narrative
Evocative imagery — The visual language blends bleakness with beauty, ensuring the audience confronts crisis viscerally.
Character mosaic — Four perspectives, each distinct, come together to form a broader ecological reflection.
Philosophical depth — Not content to warn or inform, the film asks viewers to reconsider how they live in the Anthropocene.
Balance of intimacy and scale — Grounded stories resonate with global implications, preventing abstraction from distancing the audience.
Awards & Recognition
Festival premieres: Launched at Montreal’s Festival International du Film sur l’Art in March 2025.
Festival circuit: Screened at Canadian Film Fest, Sherbrooke’s Festival du cinéma mondial, and other regional showcases.
Theatrical release: Opened in Quebec on April 18, 2025, timed with Earth Day awareness campaigns.
Critics Reception: Traceable Reflections of Climate Anxiety
Viewers praised its meditative pace, poetic imagery, and bold emotional honesty, calling it less a film to “watch” than to “absorb.”
Critics noted its quiet but insistent power, describing it as a cinematic “eco-anxiety diary” that resonates with those who feel paralyzed by the scale of the crisis.
Some suggested its fragmented, allegorical style may challenge audiences seeking linear narrative, but this was seen as a deliberate strength, echoing the fractured reality of climate disruption.
Reviews: Quiet, Intelligent, and Visually Potent
Strengths: Arresting cinematography, deeply human stories, and fearless environmental allegory.
Weaknesses: Narrative opacity and deliberate pacing may test mainstream audiences.
Consensus: A powerful meditation on survival and responsibility that prioritizes emotional truth over entertainment.
Release Timeline
Festival premiere: March 21, 2025, Montreal.
Quebec theatrical release: April 18, 2025.
Future distribution: Likely to expand slowly through Canadian and international art-house channels.
Movie Trend: Climate Crisis Through Artistic Allegory
Waiting for the Storms embodies a trend where filmmakers use metaphor and multi-character mosaics to address climate change, aiming for reflection and transformation rather than spectacle.
Social Trend: Eco-Storytelling for Empathy
The film contributes to global conversations about climate anxiety and migration, offering empathy and human-scale stories that bridge statistics with lived experience.
Final Verdict: A Visual Call to Feel for the Future
François Delisle’s Waiting for the Storms is less a conventional drama than a cinematic fable, a poetic attempt to transform ecological awareness into visceral emotional experience. With four characters navigating collapse in radically different ways, the film urges audiences to reflect, act, and most of all, to care. It is both haunting and hopeful — a meditation on humanity at the brink.
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