How We Learned To Stop Worrying and Burned Down ‘The Welcome Table’

In case you missed it, Europe is basically melting. Massive wildfires have burned across France, Spain and Greece, while extreme drought has pushed the Danube to record-low levels in Hungary. This isn’t some freak stretch of bad luck. Europe is now warming more than twice as quickly as the global average, according to Copernicus.

The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. Wildfires have torched more than 90,000 hectares in France this year (an area about twice the size of Chicago) and more than 200,000 hectares in Spain (one and a half Los Angeles). The world is changing for the worse because of climate change, and the evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Here in America, we’ve experienced our share of wildfires, floods and hurricanes. The whole of the Eastern U.S. donned masks for a couple of days when smoke came down from massive Canadian wildfires. Oregon is choking through smoke now. Just last week, while visiting my hometown of Chicago, my kids and I had to go into the basement at my mom’s house because another tornado was moving through Illinois. Through July 27, the state had recorded a combined 220 confirmed tornadoes and preliminary reports in 2026—more than twice the total of any other state.

Watching HBO’s newest climate documentary The Welcome Table against this hellscape makes the film feel especially terrifying.

The Welcome Table is a sobering watch. It pulls no punches in its examination of what we’re experiencing as a global collective, and it sucks. There’s no clever way around it. People are losing their homes, their communities and, in some cases, entire ways of life. It comes from Josh Fox, the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker behind Gasland, and follows climate migrants across six continents, centering the voices and experiences of survivors on the front lines of the climate crisis. The sweep of the coverage takes us from wildfire evacuees in Paradise, California, to displaced communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh and the Caribbean.

Instead of following the standard documentary rhythm — introduce a subject, show the horror, provide a little hope, return to the horror — The Welcome Table plays more like a moving work of art. It’s colorful and vivid, filled with slivers of joy, depth, and heartache.

This isn’t Fox’s first climate documentary. He also made How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change (2016) and The Edge of Nature (2023). This time around, he seems determined to push further into the artistic side of his filmmaking. People are shown in the wild of their lives, Fox shows the HOW of what happens to communities as they’re faced with less and less social resources in the face of the boot of never-ending climate terror, but like, artistic and happy with quick edits and strong visuals. Musical interludes from New Orleans performers appear throughout the film, giving the material room to breathe and offering something more emotionally complicated than the usual message of, “Well, we’re completely fucked.”

The film’s participants include climate refugees, aid workers, community leaders and activists such as Leo Farah and Chris Obehi. True to Fox’s documentary style, the film features spirituals, hymns, and songs to belt out toward the heavens; eventually building toward a mass singing celebration on a New Orleans levee. There, a 1,000-foot table becomes a symbol of connection and resistance — a literal answer to the film’s guiding question: How do we welcome those with nowhere left to go?

I found the film memorable because of its ability to tell the stories of people living on the front lines of a rapidly changing global ecosystem. It forces those of us enjoying the relative comfort of the developed world to question our place inside the central machinery of capitalism.

Watching it, you can’t help but feel complicit simply for trying to exist as a regular person. But that’s the grift. Major corporations get to pollute, pollute, and pollute some more, while the rest of us are told to carefully separate our plastic into special trash cans. According to the OECD, only 9% of the world’s plastic waste is ultimately recycled. The burden of saving the planet is pushed onto ordinary people while the companies doing the most damage continue operating as usual.

The stories these subjects tell — and the words they use to tell them — feel healing. It is good medicine to allow people to expel what hurts inside them and to be heard without having their pain turned into spectacle. From displaced Aboriginal communities to Indigenous fishing villages, the people with the fewest resources are often the ones forced to confront the greatest consequences of a crisis they did the least to create.

The Welcome Table understands that climate change is not only a scientific or political crisis. It is a human one. The film doesn’t offer an easy solution or pretend that a song and a long table can undo generations of exploitation. But it argues that welcoming one another, listening and refusing to look away might be where any meaningful response has to come to sit.