Movie Monthly: Countdown to Copenhagen

Before the economic levees burst, letting loose a wave of bank failures and bailouts, it seemed like the future of the planet was actually of vital importance to politicians. But as the recent side-lining of climate change at the G20 meeting showed, right now politicians are bent on firming up the old world order rather than laying the foundations for a low-carbon future.

It doesnt' bode well. The Guardian newspaper recently polled 250 leading climate scientists. Only 18 thought governments were doing enough to prevent temperatures rising higher than the target of 2C above pre-industrial levels and most thought temperatures would rise by 4C by the end of the century.

In December, we'll get a better sense of what substance lies behind the green rhetoric when the nations of the world meet to broker a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Accord at the two-week Copenhagen Climate Conference.

UK filmmaker Franny Armstrong who previously made McLibel and Drowned Out (reviewed here), believes Copenhagen may be our last chance. Her latest film, The Age of Stupid (www.ageofstupid.net) offers a realistic vision of what the world will look like if action on climate change doesn't happen soon.

Part-documentary and part drama it stars Pete Postlethwaite (Brassed Off) as the last man alive in a devastated world in 2055. London is under water, Sydney destroyed by fire. As he reviews footage from 2008 he asks why we didn't do more to halt climate change when we had the chance. Interweaved with this futuristic fiction are six individual documentary stories – including an Indian entrepreneur starting up a low-cost airline, an 82-year-old French mountain guide who has watched the rapid melting of local glaciers, and a windfarm developer fighting local lobby groups in England.

The indefatigable Armstrong has assembled a team that has created as much a movement as a movie. The film had an unconventional path to production from the start. It was “crowd-funded” by selling shares to disparate groups and individuals – and it has been released both through traditional theatrical and a multitude of grass-roots channels in the UK. It had a solar-powered, low-carbon world premiere in London's Leicestar Square in March with simultaneous screenings across the UK. Critics have praised its passionate tone, animations, and handling of subject-matter. We may have to wait until Fall before we get a chance to see the movie in Canada, but you'll no doubt hear more about it before then. Watch this space.

In An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Al Gore suggested that we have “just ten years to avert a major catastrophe.” That puts us in the timeframe of an earlier ecological disaster movie Soylent Green (1973). Charlton Heston is a cop solving a sinister conspiracy in an overpopulated world being baked by the Greenhouse Effect (the term “climate change” had still to be coigned). Gas-guzzlers clutter the streets of Manhattan 2022 (no sea level rises in this dystopia) and people pedal bicycles to generate electricity. The Seventies-style futurism is strangely reassuring (and entertaining). We've come far: even a Hollywood formula movie like The Day After Tomorrow is capable of imagining potent images of how the nature can turn on us. Hopefully, politicians will have the vision to act too.

Toronto's Hot Docs, the biggest documentary film festival in North America, finished last month with a 42% increase in attendances over 2008. The winner of the fest's Audience Award went to The Cove, a film following former Flipper trainer Richard O'Barry and activists as they try to end the capture and slaughter of wild dolphins in a cove in Taiji, Japan. The film, which also won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, is due for release in August.

Hot Docs opening film Act of God, about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning, opens 5 June in Vancouver. Jennifer Baichwal, the Toronto filmmaker behind the visually eloquent Manufactured Landscapes, questions the randomness of such an event through seven lightning-strike stories. Intriguingly, Fred Frith, renowned guitar improviser, personally demonstrates the ubiquity of electricity in our bodies and the universe.