The Feature Film
From the streets of Brooklyn to the forests of Siberia, a relentless barrage of fires, floods, and storms has made devastatingly clear that the extreme weather climate scientists have been predicting for half a century is here. Emmy-winning filmmakers Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs capture a year of climate extremes through the eyes of everyday people around the world. Built out of thousands of hours of in-the-moment footage, The Here Now Project transforms the ordinary act of shooting a cell phone video into the radical act of bearing witness.
Our Team
GREG JACOBS AND JON SISKEL
Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel are the founders of Siskel/Jacobs Productions, a Chicago-based documentary production company specializing in films that tackle vital stories with integrity, complexity, and emotion. Their first documentary, the landmark History Channel special 102 Minutes That Changed America, won three Primetime Emmys, was named the Best Nonfiction TV Episode of the year by iTunes, and has since been seen by over fifty million people in 150 countries. Their next film, Louder Than a Bomb, won seventeen festival awards and finished with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, before premiering on the Oprah Winfrey Network. After winning a News and Documentary Emmy for their National Geographic Channel special Witness: Katrina, Greg and Jon served as the U.S. Executive Producers of 1916: The Irish Rebellion, an award-winning public television series that aired around the globe. They then co-directed the 2018 feature documentary No Small Matter, which moved the needle on the issue of early childhood education in the U.S. through nearly two thousand screenings and an ambitious impact campaign. Their 2020 film, The Road Up, premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival, winning the Audience Award for Best Documentary. Jon is a 2023 Meier Achievement Award recipient and the Producer/Director of Memorial, a documentary short about the July 4, 2022 mass shooting in his hometown of Highland Park, Illinois. Greg is a 2016-2017 New America Fellow and the author of Getting Around Brown, a history of school desegregation in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
Co-Directors/Co-Producers
WENDY ABRAMS
Wendy Abrams is the founder and CEO of the Eleven Eleven Foundation, devoted to sustainability, education, healthcare and social justice. In 2019, Abrams was honored by RFK Human Rights as a Ripple of Hope Award Laureate for her activism. Abrams is a founding partner of The Earthshot Prize, in partnership with the Royal Foundation. Abrams has used public art as a platform for activism; she curated the “Invisible Words” exhibition to amplify the voices of the homeless, and in 2006, Abrams established Cool Globes, Inc., a nonprofit promoting climate change awareness.
Executive ProducerJOHN FARBROTHER
John Farbrother co-edited the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning PBS Frontline documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, directed by Steve James. He also edited the MTV Documentary Films feature Finding Yingying, directed by Jiayan “Jenny” Shi, which won the 2020 Documentary Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice at South by Southwest; Hidden Letters, which premiered the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Independent Lens; Surf Nation, which premiered at Mountainfilm; the Peabody Award-winning One with the Whale, which aired on Independent Lens; and The Dating Game, which premiered at Sundance in 2025. A frequent collaborator with Siskel/Jacobs Productions, John edited Louder Than a Bomb and The Road Up, and co-edited No Small Matter with Miranda Yousef.
EditorKATERINA SIMIC
Katerina Simic’s work has been seen on PBS, CNN, History, A&E, the National Geographic Channel, and at various film festivals, including Sundance and Tribeca. Katerina edited Siskel/Jacobs Productions’ National Geographic Channel special Witness: Katrina, which won the 2011 News and Documentary Emmy for Historical Programming. Since then, she has collaborated with Kartemquin Films on a number of projects, including Steve James’ acclaimed City So Real, Raj Patel and Zak Piper’s The Ants and the Grasshopper, and Maria Finitzio’s In the Game.
EditorKUBILAY UNER
Kubilay Uner makes adventurous, eclectic, colorful music for media ranging from film and television to concerts and records. Credits include his SCL Award-nominated score for the Al Pacino historical drama American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally; the 90s throwback action film Force of Nature starring Mel Gibson; the Lionsgate Western Gone Are the Days starring Lance Henriksen, Tom Berenger and Danny Trejo; as well as Big Sur, based on Jack Kerouac's novel; plus a genuine Wyld Stallyns track for Bill & Ted Face the Music, record productions for soul legend Bobby Womack, music for the Busch Gardens theme park ride Corkscrew Hill, and music for a video art installation in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). For the past nine years, Kubi has served as the director of the Music Composition for the Screen MFA program at Columbia College Chicago, named the world’s leading program of its kind by The Hollywood Reporter in 2022 and 2023.
ComposerSAROFSKY
Sarofsky is a one-stop cross-media production company, specializing in creating high-end, premium storytelling content for brands and for the entertainment industry. Sarofsky is well-known for their title sequences for Apple, Netflix, Amazon, and Marvel Studios, as well as several documentary films. Sarofsky is based in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood.
GraphicsDIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The Here Now Project takes the user-generated video driven approach of our Emmy-winning 9/11 documentary 102 Minutes That Changed America and applies it to the issue of climate change. As with 102 Minutes, our aim is to cut against the grain of the increasingly familiar, even obligatory, approaches of more traditional documentaries on the subject. The Here Now Project is raw rather than “filmic”. It doesn’t follow a standard victim/villain narrative. It’s not educational, explanatory, or explicitly political. Instead, it’s visceral, immersive, and—as we see it, at least—subversive, a climate change film masquerading as an extreme weather documentary.
Our goal Is to convey the urgency of climate change in a way that can reach audiences numb to what The New York Times’ Amanda Hess called "the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself.” Climate communications specialists have consistently found that ordinary people (ordinary Americans, in particular) often view climate change as something that’s happening to someone else, somewhere else, sometime in the future. By distilling a year’s worth of climate-amplified extreme weather events into a single narrative experience, The Here Now Project allows audiences to connect the dots themselves and see the pattern that emerges.
Moreover, the film’s unique structure provides a compulsively engaging way for them to wrap their heads around what can seem like a problem of unfathomable scale: the global, interconnected, ever-accelerating nature of climate change itself. And it does so through a visual language that’s about as universal and accessible as you can get: the common narrative currency of cell phones and social media. So while the film includes footage in at least twelve languages from seventeen different countries, the effect we hope to create is one of borderless empathy, and in turn, common cause. The Here Now Project is a climate change film unlike any other, and recent extreme weather events have only served to magnify the urgency of its message: “We’re all in this. Together.”
—Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, Co-Directors
The Campaign: Climate is Here, Now
The public engagement campaign Climate is Here, Now puts the story of climate change back into the hands of the people experiencing it. Through first-hand storytelling, we're helping people recognize they're not alone—and offering on-ramps to join the fight against climate denial.
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"A pulsing and terrifying look at what will become of the world if we do not collectively act, The Here Now Project serves as an urgent reminder that Mother Nature will no longer allow us to sit idly and record from the sidelines.
—Courtney Small, POV Magazine
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"What emerges is more than an assembly of clips, but a larger picture of a world in crisis told by the people forced to live through them without much advanced warning.
—Andrew Parker, The Gate
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“Despite the tremendous odds against us, the film’s structure does seem to remind the viewer that humanity is connected.
—Steve Norton, Screenfish
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"It’s shaky, unpolished and mesmerizing, often mere steps from total disaster, and very much on the frontlines.
—Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee
here now project in the press
“It’s like a horror movie,” exclaims a man from Zhengzhou, China as he records himself gingerly walking along the side of a flooded train tunnel with other passengers. Although his words speak to the treacherous realities of his current circumstance, he could easily be speaking directly about Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s latest documentary The Here Now Project.
“From a deep freeze in Texas and a dust storm in Brazil to swarms of locusts in Kenya, revolting “mucilage” in Turkey, floods from Germany to China, and wildfires in every corner of the globe, co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel deliver an urgent, engrossing and highly effective eco-doc unlike any other. There are no stats or diagrams here, no commentary from scientists or activists, just raw, sometimes disturbing and often extremely emotional footage of exactly what it means for humans and nature when the planet warms up by just a degree or two.”
For Press inquires, please contact greg@siskeljacobs.com