In There Will Come Soft Rains, Afghan filmmaker Elham Ehsas offers a singularly powerful response to the climate crisis. Not through sweeping environmental imagery or catastrophe, but through a single woman’s quiet, defiant act of love. The short film which is now Oscar® and BAFTA-qualified, is one of the most radical pieces of climate storytelling in recent memory precisely because it refuses spectacle, and instead reaches for something older, deeper, and more intimate: tradition, faith, and family.

Olivia D’Lima delivers a beautiful and haunting performance as Mira, a British-Pakistani woman driven to exhume her father’s grave to protect it from rising sea levels. It’s a decision that at first appears deeply personal but through Ehsas’ restrained direction and poetic symbolism, we begin to understand it as a seismic confrontation with religious authority, cultural expectation, and the urgent physical realities of a planet in crisis.

The power of the film lies in how it reframes the climate conversation. Rather than assigning blame or indulging in dystopian dread, it asks: What do we value most when the ground beneath us shifts? Who gets to define what is sacred in a world collapsing around us?

Ehsas has already made his mark with Yellow, but There Will Come Soft Rains represents a creative evolution a deeper, more daring vision. He does not use Muslim identity as an aesthetic gesture or a narrative prop; it is the spiritual and moral foundation of the story. This is climate cinema that speaks to communities often left out of the global environmental discourse, and it does so with tenderness, rage, and reverence.

Visually, the film is a masterclass in tone and restraint. Yiannis Manolopoulos’ cinematography captures the muted beauty of a dying landscape without ever feeling bleak. Production designer Rana Fadavi builds sacred spaces that feel both domestic and eternal, embodying the spiritual fracture Mira is grappling with.

Rushil Ranjan’s score, featuring vocals by Abi Sampa, weaves South Asian musicality into the emotional fabric of the film, heightening its sense of longing and unresolved grief.

There Will Come Soft Rains is a climate story, yes. However, it is also a human story, a feminist story, and a spiritual story. It doesn’t lecture. It listens. And in listening, it gives voice to the silences we rarely dare to explore on screen.

★★★★★
A quietly radical masterpiece. This is what the future of climate storytelling must look like rooted in humanity, cultural truth, and emotional clarity.

Jakob Allen