The girl behind the green cause
Film shows how Greta grew into activist.
Filmmaker Nathan Grossman had no idea the 15-year-old girl sitting on the sidewalk outside the Swedish parliament was going to make history.
Grossman’s documentary about teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, “I Am Greta,” opens on Friday. He spoke to the Star from his home in Stockholm via Zoom about the year he spent following her, as a solo protest quickly grew into a global movement.
Grossman initially walked past Thunberg when he arrived to film one of her early Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for climate) protests in 2018. Under five feet tall, she was sitting alone, leaflets under a rock in front of her, a handmade sign at her side.
The world now knows the determined, straight-talking teen for calling world leaders to task for climate inaction and spearheading the Fridays for Future movement, in which millions of young people around the world have gone on school strikes to demand political action to stop climate change.
Grossman’s documentary, opening after screenings at film festivals in Venice and Toronto, follows the young climate activist from early protests to her powerful “how dare you?” speech to world leaders at the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit.
In a case of right place-right time filmmaking, Grossman followed a tip from a colleague about Thunberg’s protests and decided to take a look.
What began as a possible film project about teen climate activists switched to focus on Greta as the school strike movement took off, becoming 29year-old Grossman’s first feature documentary.
“I seriously had no idea that this was going to translate into something that was going to go beyond, you know, Swedish national television,” he said.
Grossman said he assured Thunberg that she could tell him to stop filming at any time she felt uncomfortable.
The documentary reveals her personality beyond media reports and YouTube videos. She dances with unselfconscious joy, dotes on the family dogs and loves a good joke, especially when it comes to teasing her father/road-trip minder, Svante. She is relentlessly driven, a self-described nerd and since her Asperger’s syndrome makes her crave routine, deviating from that can make her shut down.
Consumed by the cause, Thunberg often struggles with anxiety. Yet she is surprisingly unfazed by shameful personal criticism hurled by adults and internet trolls who call her mentally ill and mock her grave appearance. Remarkably, she laughs some of it off.
“I think that was the first time where I fully saw her kind of interact with the criticism,” said Grossman.
Her peers are not always kind. She’s seen sitting alone, eating her lunch surrounded by classmates in the school cafeteria who ignore her. “I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice,” she says of bullies.
It’s interesting to watch her mature onscreen.
“She was fairly shy and we spoke about climate change,” Grossman said of their first meeting. “But of course, during the course of the year, I could see not only with me but also with others that she developed her social skills and she became much better in English and, yeah, she became more of a grown-up.”
Grossman didn’t interview her parents or go into detail about Thunberg’s backstory. He wanted the film to reflect what he calls her interior monologue. As the film’s occasional narrator, her diary entries were used for the script.
“Many of those lines are actually in the film. And many of them are very striking. I think many of them are my favourite kind of most truthful insights,” said Grossman.
“I think that was my goal with making this film, not stuffing it with lots of information about every corner. I wanted to see if I could bring people into her world. And I think that’s what cinema is made for,” he said.
Grossman brings audiences into Thunberg’s physical world by keeping his camera at her eye level, not easy for the sixfoot-two-inch filmmaker, who spent much of his time hunched over. She’s a small teen in the midst of tall adults, speaking frankly to them about their responsibilities, her generation’s expectations for climate action and the kind of world they owe them.
Avegetarian who lives climate activism daily, Thunberg won’t fly because of the climate toll. She crosses the Atlantic Ocean in sickeningly rough seas on a racing yacht to speak at the UN, the queasy-making, two-week journey filmed by Grossman.
“We now know what quarantine is. It’s two weeks. That’s a sailing over the Atlantic,” he said.
Now 17, Thunberg returned to high school in August after a year off to focus on climate activism.
She remains committed to forcing change. Her social media shows her back with weekly school strikes outside the Swedish parliament. This time she’s not alone, although the gatherings are small. Most students are wearing masks.
The protest will continue, Grossman believes, not because the students want to be in the spotlight but because they feel they have no other way to safeguard their future.
“It’s more just that you’re young and you understand that you don’t have any other option when you see that the older generations have spent 30 to 40 years just pushing this issue on to the next meeting. And on to the next generation,” he said. “And then, of course, young people get frustrated and they need to do something.”