A Brief History of Chasing Storms

Curtis Miller
United States | 2025 | 70 min
World premiere
Languages : English, Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

The tornado is both a destructive event and a uniquely American icon, one often fraught with collective tragedy. With wit and humour, this film unfolds like an episodic road movie, raising questions of memory, inequality, colonisation, climate change, and disaster capitalism as it examines legacies of weather within this area of the United States dubbed “tornado alley”.

Tornadoes are both a destructive natural force and an iconic emblem of the United States. Entire regions live under the threat of the potential and sudden eruption of their violence. Yet the tornado also symbolically represents the myth of white America: the conquest of the West, the defiance of settlers in the face of a hostile environment, and the appropriation of land.
In a road movie which criss-crosses this region of the Midwest known as "Tornado Alley", filmmaker Curtis Miller visits memorials dedicated to the tornadoes of the past, which echo stories of colonisation and displacement. He takes a guided tour of the Twister Museum, dedicated to the eponymous films. He meets the CEO of Oz, a company that builds tornado shelters, capitalising on a growing disaster market, as well as tornado chasers, on the hunt for adrenaline highs and spectacular images. Through fragments of history, memory, science and pop culture, he reveals how the construction of an entire territory lives in the collective imagination. A joyful and mischievous deconstruction of the American myth.
Mourad-Anis Moussa

A Brief History of Chasing Storms, 2025
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Mudcity, 2012