Black Butterflies

This animated film (winner of the Goya Award for Best Animated Feature, 2025) focuses on three women forced into exile due to climate change. In Kenya, Tanit migrates with her children from the dry, uninhabitable region of Turkana to Nairobi. In India, Shaila leaves her small island of Ghoramara, which is shrinking due to rising sea levels, to work as a housekeeper in Dubai. And Valeria flies with her children to Paris after a hurricane destabilizes life on the French island of Saint Martin. All three women are hoping for a better life, but in their new environments they face a wall of bureaucracy as well as sexual and other forms of exploitation.

Based on Baute’s live-action inquiry, Climate Exodus, the film merges highly intimate and personal narratives from women across the globe forced to leave their homelands when natural forces render them uninhabitable.

Inspired by real women , the film uses animation to raise awareness about the consequences of global warming and remind us that climate change is no joke, and it does so in an intelligent, raw, elegant and tremendously tough way, showing us the before and after of three families who see their lives crumble in a matter of seconds. It’s not easy to see , especially for us women, but it’s necessary to raise awareness among all of us, regardless of gender, about what’s happening outside our bubble.

Enid Roman Almansa, Cinemania