'A clear call to action'

Winegrowers throughout the world are the proverbial canaries in a coal mine. Though no different than other agricultural producers in their interest in proper stewardship, they are on the cutting edge of climate change: They grow an especially environmentally sensitive product. And it is for this reason winegrowers should be first in line to see a documentary like no other coming our way, The Age of Stupid. The film by Franny Armstrong will enjoy its world premier in the UK March 15th and the US sometime in April or May, 2009. Australia and India openings will then follow, in July and September respectively.

Six years in the making, the documentary features Academy Award nominee Pete Postlethwaite as a fictional narrator/archivist from the year 2055 looking back at 2008 film footage of the real lives of six individuals and their tangled relations to oil. The archivist’s world has been devastated by global climate change, and he repeatedly asks the question why we did nothing when we had the chance to act.

The real people followed in the film are: Layefa Malemi, a young Nigerian woman living in the ruinous wake of Shell Oil’s Niger Delta exploitation, mountain guide Fernand Pareau, an Indian airline CEO, Jeh Wadia, retired Shell Oil paleontologist (retired) and Hurricane Katrina hero, Alvin Duvernay, two children, Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud, brother and sister from Jordan, and lastly, Piers Guy, a windfarm developer from England.

Monies were raised for the effort by an innovative approach called Crowd-Funding. As described by Guardian journalist John Vidal

“They bypassed the banks and went straight to ordinary people for cash, developing the idea of ‘crowd-funding’. The first £50,000 was raised in a London bar on a single night in December 2004, and the £530,000 raised so far has come from 228 people who have invested between £500 and £35,000 each. There are still seven £10,000 shares available.

Aside from a few relatively wealthy people, many investors are made up of groups. There’s a mothers’ group, a hockey team and a women’s health centre. The investors will get their money back if the film takes £1m. ‘Our lawyer said it was the most original film-funding scheme he’d seen,’ says Armstrong.”
[These details have since changed.]

This documentary is a clear call to action. Indeed, one of the pages nested in The Age of Stupid website is named Not Stupid, an email signup page which down the road will provide info and links to community and political activities in every person’s town and country.

I encourage readers to watch the behind-the-scenes The Making of The Age of Stupid video recently posted on the Guardian site.

Donations for the film’s distribution and/or the social action campaign, Not Stupid, may be made here.