Coming to theatres this Friday, April 6: SURVIVING PROGRESS
Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks premiered their study of the pitfalls of progress at Toronto before heading to Vancouver, Montreal, IDFA, and Dubai before the end of the year. Since then, it’s screened at a number of additional festivals in addition to theatrical runs in Canada. First Run Features brings the film to the US for a theatrical run beginning at Cinema Village and the Film Society’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in NYC this weekend and expanding on April 20.
Adapted from Ronald Wright’s A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS, a treatise on how too-accelerated progress in technology, population, and consumption, may very well lead to the destruction of our civilization, Roy and Crooks gather the author and a number of other notable thinkers to explore the “progress traps” we’ve created for ourselves. While the interview subjects offer compelling food for thought, the filmmakers smartly eschew a strictly talking heads approach by incorporating stunning visuals from all over the globe. Moving from the ancient, defunct civilizations focused on in Wright’s book, the documentary hones in on the present and the underside of today’s interconnected world, where financial or environmental crises recognize no national or geographic border. Despite tackling a huge issue from often disparate, wide-ranging perspectives (though essentially linked by the commonsensical dictum that we should consume less), the film remains grounded and relatable, offering concrete examples of the problems we’re collectively facing, as well as a variety of solutions.
what (not) to doc 