Filmmakers Pitch Hope: See Our Movies, Save the World
Two new movies, “Racing Extinction” and “This Changes Everything,” both explore the devastation humanity has wrought on the natural world. Yet rather than focusing only on what is dying and lost, both films offer messages of hope, profiling people who have helped stop, animal by animal, hectare by hectare, the pillaging of wildlife and land.
The question is whether people will go see the films. Accounts of global warming tend to leave those who aren’t apathetic paralyzed and depressed, and tales of animal cruelty and extinction can be too harrowing to bear.
The director of “Racing Extinction,” Louie Psihoyos, who won an Oscar for his 2009 documentary, “The Cove,” about the annual dolphin slaughter in Japan, said people still tell him they lack the nerve to see that film. And Naomi Klein, who adapted “This Changes Everything,” based on her book of the same name, said a film salesman told her that he would market the movie only if there was no reference to climate change in the marketing.
“If you beat people over the head with shame, guilt and despair, you get exactly what you expect — people turn away and try to forget about it,” said Shawn Heinrichs, a photographer and an activist featured in “Racing Extinction.”
Aware of such feelings, the teams behind each film developed similar plans: target the people most passionate about what’s at stake, and bank on them to draw in others.
As he did with “The Cove,” Mr. Psihoyos sought to create a thriller, using undercover spies to expose animal traffickers while highlighting acts of environmentalist derring- do. “Racing Extinction” got a head start with its message this summer when the director and his collaborators projected images of endangered animals onto the Empire State Building. The film opened last month, and an awards run is being eyed. ( It helps that Mr. Psihoyos has name recognition from his Oscar win.) But whether “Racing Extinction” has a broader impact may not be clear until December 2, when the Discovery Channel plans to broadcast it in prime time in about 220 countries and territories.
John Hoffman, executive vice president for documentaries and specials at Discovery, said the channel’s executives decided to throw their weight behind the film after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
“We have aired things globally, but never as this sort of call to action,” Mr. Hoffman said, adding: “We have to say to the world, ‘For a moment, we have to stop, and look at the issues’ ” the film raises.
The December 2 date is strategic: COP21, the United Nations climate change conference, is to be held in Paris from November 30 through December 11.
Similarly, Ms. Klein and Avi Lewis, her husband and the film’s director, hustled to get “This Changes Everything” out well ahead of COP21.
The film focuses on grass-roots movements that thwarted oil companies and communities that embraced renewable energy. Ms. Klein and Mr. Lewis, both longtime activist journalists, began building support for the documentary when she started researching her book about five years ago. They hired an outreach director immediately, and worked with groups like 350.org, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to plan screenings. Such organizations can draw in audiences that may be further galvanized by what they see, Ms. Klein said.
“Films don’t change the world, movements do,” she added.
“This Changes Everything,” released October 2, also had showings in a dozen cities last month, including in Amsterdam, where it was projected on a coal-fired power station. The film will be available on iTunes on October 20.
The “Racing Extinction” promoters made sure they had an infrastructure in place before the film opened, ready to give answers to viewers who ask, “What can I do?”
They teamed with Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, and his company Vulcan to push for laws banning the trafficking of endangered species, among other initiatives, and exhorted, via social media and a website, supporters to do the same.
Mr. Psihoyos chose an image from one of his projections — a manta ray, glowing on a tall building — for the film’s poster, certainly more beckoning than any picture of the largescale marine killing that the film explores.
It’s all part of the effort to get people to see the movie and then take an action. The message Mr. Psihoyos is propounding is that each voice and each act counts: Outrage generated by “The Cove” helped reduce dolphin killings in Japan to 6,000 a year from 23,000.
“We set up a chorus of people doing amazing things so at the end, people want to join us, rather than get full of despair,” Mr. Psihoyos said. “We try to bookend everything we do with hope.”
Two documentaries that try to reach beyond shame.