Grounded: A climate justice film screening and conversation

About the event

Grounded is a short animated film that explores climate justice not as an abstract concept, but as something lived, uneven, and deeply political.

Taking place as part of UCL’s 28 Days of Sustainability, this one-hour event brings together a screening of Grounded followed by a curated conversation reflecting on the process behind the film: how collective discussions on climate crisis, inequality, and responsibility are translated into visual narratives, what is simplified or lost in that process, and whose voices remain marginal. 

The film was developed through RECAST: Reframing Climate Action as Social JusTice, an interdisciplinary project by DECOLAB, in collaboration with the UCL Institute for Global Health, and funded by UCL’s Grand Challenge of Climate Crisis. 

Rather than offering solutions, the event invites participants to pause, reflect, and engage with the tensions that shape contemporary climate action — and to consider what it means to stay “grounded” in questions of justice, care, and accountability.

This event is open to students, researchers, practitioners and anyone interested in climate justice, storytelling and collective responsibility. We warmly invite you to join the conversation.

Programme

• Welcome & context: Introducing Grounded, DECOLAB, RECAST, and its place within UCL’s 28 Days of Sustainability
• Film screening: Grounded (3-minute animated short)
• Pause and reflection
• Curated conversation: With contributors involved in the RECAST workshops and the filmmaking process
• Audience reflections and closing invitation

Speakers

Bipashyee Ghosh is a Lecturer in Engineering, Innovation and Public Policy at UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP).
Her research is on Innovation, Policy and Sustainability transitions. She has worked in research projects on Transformative Innovation Policy and Deep Transitions, focussing on innovation and knowledge creation towards sustainable, democratic and decolonial futures. 

Blanche Cameron is an Associate Professor at the  Bartlett School of Architecture at She is an ecological designer, builder and teacher, working at UCL and with community groups, local authorities, businesses and others on practical solutions to global health, biodiversity and climate challenges and associated social, environmental and economic injustices. She an active member of ACAN, the Architects Climate Action Network, help mentor the Bartlett School of Architecture Society and supported BSA to declare a climate and ecological emergency in 2019.

Ludovica Fales is a Lecturer in Experimental and Interactive Storytelling at UCL.An award-winning filmmaker and artist, she works at the intersection of film, emerging technologies, and expanded cinema. Through contemporary and participatory narrative forms, her practice explores questions of subjectivity, memory, and political imagination. Her films Letters from Palestine (2010), The Real Social Network (2012), Fear and Desire (2015), The Tales of the Black Saint (2021), and Lala (2023) have won multiple awards and screened at major international festivals.

Temujen Gunawardena is an Artist and Filmmaker based in the UK. For the past 15 years she led pioneering education projects and partnered with hundreds of organisations to use visual storytelling as a tool for clarity, creativity, and meaningful engagement. Her roots in both the UK and Sri Lanka connect me to different worlds, enriching my creative work and curiosity to work across cultural and social divides to find common language.

Project team:

Audrey Prost is a Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Global Health, UCL.She is medical anthropologist and epidemiology with over 15 years of experience in developing and evaluating participatory community interventions to improve women and children’s health in resource-constrained settings and in the context of the climate crisis. She recently co-led a UCL Grand Challenge project on translocal learning for planetary health, which engaged community-based organisations in India, Peru, Kenya, the US, and Finland to describe ways in which they addressed the interlocking crises of environmental degradation, climate change, and COVID in their settings

Lakshmi Priya Rajendran is an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her work sits at the intersection of architecture, urban studies, and storytelling, focusing on public space, spatial justice, and everyday life in cities of the Global South. She is the Director of DECOLAB, a collaborative platform exploring creative and decolonial approaches to research, pedagogy and practice in the built environment. Her teaching and research uses storytelling, film, and participatory methods to rethink how cities are understood, represented, and imagined.

Maxwell Mutanda is a Lecturer in Environmental and Spatial Equity in The Bartlett School of Architecture. He is a pluridisciplinary researcher and visual artist whose data visualisation and architectural practice investigates the role of globalisation, climate and technology within the built environment.His achievements include the 2018 AFRICA’SOUT! Artist-in-Residence at Denniston Hill, New York; 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam; a 2020 Graham Foundation Grant to Individuals; a 2020 Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change grant from the Prince Claus Fund; as well as fellowships from The New Museum’s IdeasCity New Orleans; and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2020).