This Changes Everything

“Can I be honest with you? I have always kind of hated films about climate change,” reveals journalist-activist Naomi Klein, author of and , at the start of this film inspired by her eponymous book and directed by her husband Avi Lewis. Klein doesn’t believe that a desperate polar bear or a melting ice cap is going to spark people into action – something she clearly wants to do. So in this film she has chosen to strike a very different tone. The climate crisis offers opportunities to change a reprehensible economic system by shifting the focus from growth and profits to human values and the natural world. In voice-over, Klein underpins her story with portraits of communities at the front line of climate change. We see groups resisting large, polluting projects such as gold mines in Greece, oil sand mining in Canada and coal-fired power plants in India. The calmness of the threatened natural and living environments is rendered in deliberate and beautiful shots, as are the intense emotions expressed by those involved. All these people believe in a better world and in combating the political conviction that economic interests should always prevail, and sometimes they even succeed. This stance of resistance is clearly something Klein wants to encourage.