New to DVD and VOD this week: POPULATION BOOM
Werner Boote’s investigation into the truth behind overpopulation fears debuted in Austrian theatres in 2013. Festival screenings include CPH:DOX, One World, Transylvania, Washington DC’s Environmental film fest, and several other environmental festivals around the world.
Just around Halloween 2011, the media briefly turned its attention to an announcement that the world’s population had reached seven billion, a growth of one billion inhabitants in just a dozen years, sparking renewed interest in the long-held fears of an overpopulated Earth short on basic natural resources. As a result, Austrian filmmaker Boote sets out around the globe to question whether these concerns are justified, adopting an on-camera host presence a la Michael Moore. It’s immediately apparent that Boote doesn’t believe in the supposed dangers of overpopulation, but he feigns naiveté in interview after interview to tease out the real culprits that have led to the problems facing the world. While the established arguments would have it that exponential population growth puts a strain on our global capacity for food, energy, and water, Boote and his interview subjects offer the practical reasoning that it’s not simply a question of overpopulation, but of overconsumption – and the people taking more than their fair share are not the poor of the developing world, who typically don’t have easy access to the planet’s limited non-renewable resources, but instead the greedy developed world, and, more specifically, the banks and the petrochemical industries. Overpopulation, in this conception, is merely a convenient but powerful distraction to shift the blame for a lack of resources from the 1% haves who are swallowing them up to the 99% have-nots who are struggling to make due without. While a simple argument, it’s compelling, but Boote’s tired filmmaking approach, which includes an especially irksome repeated image of the director pretending to read a paper while standing in the middle of traffic in various world cities, as well as extended, non-dynamic sit down interviews, robs the film of the impact it might have had in more capable hands.
what (not) to doc 