SYNOPSIS

Nostalgia for the Storm is a feature length experimental essay documentary, shot entirely on 16mm and using the landscape of the midwest and Great Plains as its backdrop. The film stems from the filmmaker’s childhood, growing up outside of Chicago and his fear of tornadoes from a young age. The film is an amalgamation of many things, but aims to capture a sense of the deeply complex state of the country by way of highlighting the divisive politics in a post Covid world. The film explores a number of ecological horrors and atrocities encountered by the filmmaker, the ubiquity of tornadoes and violent weather within tornado alley, the area with the largest occurrence of tornadoes in the world and the filmmaker’s personal journey through the process of making the film. The film uses geographical markers as its jumping off point and attempts to find connection and make sense of disparate subjects under the wing of the continental U.S. 

The production of the film began in the spring of 2023 with a trip to Oklahoma to attempt to witness and capture a tornado while also examining the landscape and industry of Oklahoma, a state that the filmmaker had never been to. The attempt to capture a fleeting weather phenomenon and document the journey to do so was directly inspired by the poeticism of Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler’s 1994 film, Picture of Light. Like that film, Nostalgia for the Storm delves into the phenomenon in a multitude of ways both personal to the filmmaker and deeply affecting to the communities in Oklahoma and the Great Plains states, rooted in the reality of the destructive storms that have hit the region.

Central to the film is the story of Picher, a small town in northeast Oklahoma that was exploited in its extractive use of lead and zinc mining for over a century before the townspeople were eventually bought out and evacuated because of extensive pollution from the mining waste. Decades of dumping literal dunes of millions of tons of unprotected waste that polluted the water and air and allowed children to freely play on the elements, drastically increased the rate of birth defects in the community, lead poisoning and other health problems for residents. A handful of residents remained until an EF4 tornado struck the town in 2008, destroying much of the remaining infrastructure and effectively removed the rest of the population. The area is in the process of remediation and is a part of the Tar Creek Superfund site, adjacent to the Quapaw and Cherokee Nations.

The film dives into the twentieth and twenty first century histories of Oklahoma and the Plaines with a focus on the environmental impacts of human intervention. For example, although Oklahoma is known for having strong tornadoes, the occurrence and intensity of earthquakes has drastically increased in the last fifteen years due to fracking. Water is injected deep into the earth and can disturb pre-existing faults. This has become a more serious issue in the last decade as demonstrated by an earthquake that hit the state in 2011, which was the strongest in its history. The phenomenon has become known as the Oklahoma earthquake swarm.

Oklahoma City has also seen a rise in strong tornadoes due to climate change. The 1999 and 2013 Moore tornadoes, rated F5 and EF5, respectively, were extremely destructive with over 200mph winds. The state is a central location for warm, humid winds coming off the Gulf Coast and cold, dry winds from the northwest that meet in a flat geographic region with very little elevation change. The combination of these elements allows unstable weather to form and move easily throughout the landscape. Carl Mize, a resident of Oklahoma, for example, is not unfamiliar with the severe weather of the state. Mize has been struck by lightning six times.

The film, though steeped in the weather and climate of Oklahoma, also puts the state in the foreground to investigate the current political moment. For example, barbed wire was invented in the second half of the nineteenth century, a modern tool used for containment and incarceration. There are stories of its use as an early telephone line in rural areas like the Oklahoma panhandle and northern Texas. Weather and atmospheric noise were often problems for communicating through the wire and an early indicator of inclement weather. The modern patent for barbed wire was invented by Joseph Glidden from northern Illinois. In 2025, it’s hard not to look at these forms of control and not think of those being detained.

In April 2025 a family in Oklahoma City was unjustly raided by ICE as fascists began an open takeover of the country. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides weather forecasting, was defunded and over thirteen hundred staff laid off. Numerous other agencies and government organizations were defunded. In the midst of these drastic changes with far reaching consequences, the filmmaker looks back at the fraught 2024 presidential election, where he was present at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee following the attempted assassination on Donald Trump and at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The filmmaker drives to the geographic center of the United States on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025 in South Dakota and films the location while listening to the beginning of the next chapter of the end of U.S. democracy. The following day he heads to the geographic center of the lower 48 states in Kansas, where a small chapel and a sign produced by the Kansas Correctional Industries stand, commemorating the location. The filmmaker remembers Abraham Bolden, who he met serendipitously in the summer of 2024 during the presidential election. Bolden, who was the first black member of the secret service and served under JFK, became a friend to JFK until JFK was assassinated. According to Bolden, while preparing to testify for the Warren Commission, he was sentenced with a bogus bribery charge that landed him in prison, where he was drugged and held for over three years before finally being released.

The filmmaker travels along the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which is electrified to prevent invasive Asian Carp from traveling from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes. He is led south of the city of Chicago to a pond where the Asian Carp are caught in giant nets and hauled onto freighters to be ground into fertilizer. He thinks about the American lawn, the pollution of the water supply in Oklahoma, the electrification of water in Chicago, the creation of barbed wire in Illinois, the rapidly opening ICE detention facilities and the future of the country as longstanding infrastructure is dismantled and our country collapses from our own ridiculous problems.

BIO

Director, Charles Cadkin

Charles Cadkin is a visual artist concerned with documenting and preserving neglected personal and local histories through ecology, topography, landscape and body. His work is in the film collection at the Museum of Modern Art and has screened nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Other Cinema, Light Field, Moviate Underground Film Festival, No Name Cinema, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Indiana University, Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival and ULTRAcinema. He has received funding and support from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Interbay Cinema Society and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, among other institutions. He holds a BS in Cinema and Photography from Ithaca College and resides in Chicago, IL.

Cinematographer, Andrew Skalak

Andrew Skalak (b. Davenport, Iowa) is a director of photography living and working in Chicago, Illinois. His projects have screened at Doc NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, A Century of 16mm at Indiana University, and Seattle International Film Festival, among others. In 2025 he was selected to attend the Carrizozo artist residency program in Carrizozo, New Mexico.

From 2021-2024 he consulted on the design and operations of a new independent cinema (lastpicturehouse.com) with directors Scott Beck and Brian Woods.

Cinematographer, Alex Halstead

Alex Halstead is an award-winning cinematographer with over 40 shorts and 4 features under his belt. Thinking of film as a magic trick, Alex encourages an audience’s imagination to flourish within each project through both new and established visuals techniques.