Josh Fox's 'The Welcome Table' documentary debuts on
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- Josh Fox, the Emmy-winning director of Gasland, has made a new documentary called "The Welcome Table" that airs on HBO on 23 June, traveling to climate-affected regions including Paradise, California, São Sebastião, Brazil, the Turkana Basin in Kenya, Peru, and Australia.
- The film asserts that one-third of all humanity will lose their homes to climate change, citing a 2020 PNAS study; the World Bank projected 216 million extreme-heat migrants by 2050, a more conservative figure.
- In Brazil, Fox met a "queer dream team of disaster mutual aid workers" in a favela led by humanitarian Léo Farah, co-founder of the group Humus, who aid those hit by landslides and extreme weather.
- In Kenya, Fox featured indigenous Turkana community members Arot and Lodoyo, who are fighting to remain in their drought-stricken homeland and want to address the UN directly about the crisis.
- None of the Kenyan participants were granted US visas to attend the film's New Orleans gathering; only Purity Gakuo, a Kenyan climate change advocate serving as a Turkana liaison, was allowed entry from the entire continent of Africa.
- Fox frames climate change as "economic and political oppression created by a billionaire class" and includes footage of ICE raids and statements by Donald Trump to draw a direct line between US immigration policy and global climate displacement.
Why it matters: Fox, already famous for Gasland, is using his HBO platform to argue that the climate crisis and the US anti-immigrant movement are intertwined — backed by the blunt fact that his own film's African participants couldn't secure US visas to attend the premiere. For climate communicators, the documentary's pairing of hard data (the 1-in-3 PNAS figure, the World Bank's 216 million estimate) with on-the-ground testimony from LGBTQ+ and indigenous frontline communities offers a human-led counterweight to policy-driven coverage when it streams June 23.
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