“Heat is like a death sentence,” a Kuwait-based meteorologist tells the camera in Jacqueline Zünd’s new documentary, a line that sets the tone for a film built around atmosphere rather than exposition. The film, titled Heat, favors image and sound over explanatory voiceover, crafting what Zünd calls a sensory experience aimed at translating the physical and social effects of extreme heat. Shot in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Egypt, the film traces lives altered by rising temperatures, revealing contrasts between those who can withdraw into cooling comfort and those who continue to labor in unbearable conditions.
The documentary interleaves several personal stories to map a larger pattern. Viewers meet a delivery driver working gruelling 12-hour shifts under the sun, a Kenyan attendant in a Dubai ice lounge, a real estate agent who brings ice and food to stray cats, and the meteorologist whose opening line frames the film. By focusing on individual routines and living spaces, Zünd illuminates how global warming becomes a daily presence for many, producing new rhythms of work and rest and exposing stark social inequality.
From fiction to documentary: parallel projects and shared research
The documentary grew alongside Zünd’s fiction feature Don’t Let the Sun, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival last year; the research for one project fed the other. While the fiction imagines entire societies moving nocturnally to escape heat, Zünd discovered that this imagined inversion already exists in pockets: construction and service workers who shift schedules to nights to survive daytime temperatures. That discovery prompted the director to stop treating the concept as pure speculation and instead document the present-day adaptations that resemble dystopian scenarios, turning an idea explored in fiction into observational cinema that probes lived realities.
Shooting under pressure: access, logistics and risk
Filming in the Gulf and Egypt brought practical and ethical hurdles. Zünd reports extreme conditions, with temperatures that sometimes climbed above 50 degrees Celsius, and a reluctance from corporations to open their facilities to camera crews. The production often operated with a minimal crew, at times shooting in workers’ shared rooms without formal authorization in order to capture intimate spaces. Those quarters varied widely: some were relatively orderly while others crammed 10 to 15 men into a single room with inadequate cooling. During a Dubai shoot the crew was briefly detained and questioned by authorities before being released; Zünd describes the encounter as a routine interruption rather than a targeted incident.
Ethics and representation
Working in private and semi-private spaces demanded sensitivity. Zünd and her team navigated consent and dignity while trying to document living conditions honestly. The crew’s decision to keep shoots small was not only pragmatic for heat management but also a deliberate choice to reduce intrusion. This approach reflects a broader production ethic: portray the subjects’ circumstances without turning them into mere spectacle, and use cinematography and sound to convey the physicality of heat rather than rely on explanatory text.
Crafting sensations: visuals, sound and memory
To make the audience feel heat, Zünd collaborated with cinematographer Nicolai von Graevenitz and editors who prioritized sonic texture. Early high-temperature footage did not visually register as hot, prompting a pivot toward layered sound design focusing on winds and ambient noises. Editors experimented with levels and frequencies to find the boundary between immersion and discomfort, ensuring the cinema experience would be compelling rather than alienating. The film opens with actual optical distortions filmed near Aswan, where natural mirages offered a powerful visual metaphor; later sequences shot on Super 8 evoke a strange nostalgia, what Zünd calls a “nostalgia of the present,” as if the film remembers today from an imagined future.
Form as argument
Choosing not to center statistics or conventional explanatory narration was intentional: Zünd wanted to bypass climate fatigue by offering a different mode of engagement. The film’s stylized imagery and carefully tuned soundscape function as an argument in themselves, showing how heat reorganizes daily life, labor patterns and urban design. Visual metaphors like mirages and tactile moments such as the delivery driver’s nighttime routine give the audience experiential access to the stakes of warming climates without leaning on didactic rhetoric.
Festival life and production credits
Heat premiered in the international competition at Visions du Réel on April 20 and is part of a festival that runs in Nyon until April 26. The documentary was produced by Louis Mataré for Lomotion AG in co-production with Zünd’s Real Film, and it received backing from ARTE and SFR. Sales are being handled by Taskovski Films. Together these partners helped realize a project that aims to reframe environmental crisis through sensation, human stories and cinematic craft rather than conventional reportage.
