Coming to theatres today, Friday, October 2: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
Avi Lewis’ look at grassroots opposition to climate change made its debut at Toronto last month. In addition to screening at the Atlantic Film Festival, the film has had a number of special screenings around Europe in the lead up to its US and Canadian release.
Inspired by her recent book of the same name, Naomi Klein serves as occasional onscreen interviewer and overly conversational narrator here. Adopting a faux, gently conspiratorial tone with the audience, she confesses she, too, is put off by climate change films – but this one is different! In practicality, it’s really not that much different. Lewis and Klein shift the focus to inspirational stories of resistance, but the basics are still here: rightly troubling information about the damage that’s been done, and continues to be done, to our planet in the shortsighted interest of profit. The contextual frame that Klein employs to make sense of how and why we’ve gotten to where we are is interesting – the widespread adoption of the Enlightenment era notion that nature is like an animal that mankind must tame, rather than something upon which humanity depends on to survive. In her view, this paradigmatic shift enabled the capitalistic impulse to exploit nature in whatever way deemed necessary to make a profit, regardless of its ultimate, catastrophic results. In Klein’s view, recognizing this underlying concept allows for the possibility of changing it, offering more hope than if one were to simply conclude that man’s basic nature is to be destructive. That’s all well and good, but the examples she uses of grassroots resistance still fall wide of enabling systemic transformation, and their coverage here is so broad that complex issues are unfortunately oversimplified. While the film is not likely to engender awakening in those not already convinced of the need for immediate action to curb climate change, its core audience will likely embrace the pep rally feel in a social issue doc subgenre that’s not typically known for optimism.
what (not) to doc 