In 2025, for the eighth consecutive year, FilmScene is thrilled to join theaters across the country to present Science on Screen® with a multi-film program starting in March, exploring the interconnected world oy mycology, climate change through anime, artificial intelligence, and more. Each event includes presentations and/or panels connected to the film with experts in the field, to enhance our understanding of science in cinema.

The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if to suggest his future. He lives his days in isolation, but finally finds work as a writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then one day, Hodaka meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky.

Dr. Erika Wise and Dr. Feng Wang join us for a presentation on why we’d expect global warming to cause more extreme rain events, and how we can tell if recent climate events are “weird.”

Erika Wise realized she was not cut out for Iowa winters after a year as a University of Iowa faculty member, and she is now a professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies extreme events like floods and droughts and tries to understand what happens in the climate system to cause them, and how they might change in the future. To figure this out, she relies on long-term climate records found in the Earth’s amazing natural archives, like trees, corals, and glaciers.

Feng Wang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences at the University of Iowa. Recognizing himself as an interpreter of climate chronicles, he uses tree rings to study Earth’s climate change from the past to future and examines how climate has shaped our forest ecosystems through time.

Presented as part of Science on Screen® – An initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.