I don’t easily cry, even with certain loss, pain, despair. If I tear up, it’s usually because some irrefutable truth pierces me through and through. Something that opens the crevasses of my mind, the cavity of my heart, the pit of my guts — all flayed open. So this rarely happens.
Last night at the Temple Theatre at Sundance, I watched a film that gave me such a pang, one that is making an indelible mark on me. Not many things do these days. Perhaps my analytical, critical MO have set gauges at calibers that no longer allow stuff in anymore. I’m realizing that my filters for the integrity of data and facts, for an unequivocal message that resonates truth, for outstanding craft and attention to detail, for some penetrating beauty, and, most importantly, the need to contain or exhibit an unquantifiable soul are preventing me from engaging with a lot of significant material. I am always waiting for something comprehensive enough to pull the rug out from under me. I may have to wait a long time, and yet last night, How to Let Go of the World, and Love All the Things That Climate Can’t Change created this pang. And I think it should become The Pang Heard Around the World.
This is not a review or critique of the film, there will be time for that, with others whose role or job is to the parse and rate this film at Sundance and beyond. This is an immediate and personal response, and I hope, an ongoing response. And perhaps I’m writing this mainly for myself, as a mark to gauge my own progress — because more than a viewing experience, this narrative is one that compels me to certain action and real world choices.
So where does one start, since this a story about not only possible endings but plausible beginnings?
An Irrevocable Truth
Ten years after An Inconvenient Truth premiered at Sundance, we have a film that presents greater urgency, that is more disheartening — framing the absolute dire dilemma we are undergoing now. But instead of preaching and instilling fear, we are first dealt a critical blow. Climate change is not merely happening, but by many accounts it’s too late, and it’s really about how to make it less fucked. And so it starts with how to embrace the facts, this truth — and still somehow fight for what can remain.
I believe the film is remarkable because it doesn’t merely convince me based on some comprehensive, statistical argument (which it does so well). It arrests me and convicts me by way of a very personal, intimate journey through what is really a collective dilemma. And so my response must be one that is also personal in both reflection and action.
Make room for despair
But even one stat will take your joy away. Like we’re at 1 degree rise already in global temperatures, and another 0.5 in the system already. We are well on track, and when we do hit 2 degrees increase, we unleash a 5–9 meter sea level rise, we’ll experience hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and lose 40% of this planet’s species.
One moment in the film, a man acknowledges and expresses that he has to make a space for despair, and then keep doing the work. If there’s one thing I learned from the film, besides all the important, urgent and harrowing facts that were charted globally en masse, it’s that letting go will be the first step or might be the same step as embracing the world. I think it’s critical if I or anyone else can come away and actually move forward, advance together. It’s OK — despair — take the air out of my lungs, trouble my mind, explode my heart. But I also summon Courage, dare I make choices now and do my part in this mandate for humanity.
First my heart broke, and then it exploded with love for a world that some already inhabit
It’s certain, things are grim. And though all the statistics, familiar and new, are damning, it’s the painful truth that human beings are solely and sorely responsible that breaks my heart.
There were a few scenes or chapters that shattered me completely, and they weren’t about devastation but they told how certain people have always taken care of themselves by taking care of their world. They told of alternate metrics for what is happiness, intelligence, civilization, a developed world. I witnessed this profoundly in the chapters featuring indigenous individuals and groups in the Amazon jungle and Pacific Islands, but also with New Yorkers in Rockaway Beach that came together in the aftermath of climate change-induced Sandy. When humans stir up waves that they cannot stop, shake the earth with its own drilling, and engage in the first climate change-induced wars with tolls of what are really climate casualties and refugees, listening to these indigenous (of Brooklyn too) human beings is a start for another way, a way that works. Because God knows, it hasn’t been working.
If there were a Categorical Imperative
As much as I don’t have many musts in life, this is a resounding imperative, because this world that I love depends on me. And I am not only responsible for contributing to the predicament, I do have agency to transform it with my choices and actions I make. These choices must extend beyond our existing energy usage/grids or recycling habits, and we must start questioning everything we consume, all the things we think we need or want. It’s our demand that creates the supply that is stopping the world from going round. And everything must happen now — like switching to 100% renewable energy. So first, understand it is a must, not a nice-to-do.
It’s about making family
We know this is about us and perhaps less so our parents, but the predicament is really magnified for our children. I myself have three beautiful futures in Mikko, Luca and Alita, but this is not about if you personally have children or not. We as humankind — human + kind (family, lineage) — have one common tomorrow in our children, and we must look after them and this place we call home.
In a scene where the most jovial character from Vanuatu is showing Josh the spot where his father’s placenta is buried under a tree, they discover the ocean has already risen enough to wash the tree away. I was immediately reminded of Mikko, my oldest, because we made a personal short film of him burying his own frozen placenta (you know, your typical home video) in Shinjuku Gyoen, an idyllic park in the middle of one of the most bustling districts in Tokyo. There’s something so symbolic and symbiotic in this act of burying a placenta for a tree, a representation of our relationship with the planet. Not a paradigm of humans/nature but just nature — the true ecology.
At the end of the film, Josh brought his entire crew and a lot of his cast from around the world on stage. They were all dancing to the music of the credits, and I was so gripped with a visceral impulse to embrace the fellow human beings around me in the theatre, all of us that share this collective dilemma. I realized Josh had made a film about family, and he included me in it. This is one way I would summarize the message: because we are family, we simply need and depend on each other. We are not merely independent agents in a free world, we are an interdependent family in an inextricably interconnected world.
Remaking the world with creative acts
The next morning I saw Herzog’s new film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. Both being Herzog and about the Internet, our single most revolutionary invention in recent human history, this was the film I looked forward to watching at Sundance. But it didn’t register with me as a whole. Without parsing the film too much, though it certainly had its classic Herzog moments and was delightfully executed, it didn’t have depth either personally or topically, only skimming the surface of things. Perhaps it had something to do with being a brand commissioned piece, but it didn’t feel it was from him. There wasn’t a relevant, holistic outlook on our connected world today, nor was there any provocation to respond to or ask questions of. Josh’s film was both personal and for the greater human family. There was a banjo in both films (Josh plays one), they both played the role of representing how humans can transcend difficulties with creative expression. Josh’s film is an example. If there was a shaman in Josh’s film, it was music. So many scenes displaying the power of the human spirit to sustain, to fight, to do right by, to just keep living through song and dance.
The message is also the medium
Earlier in the day, we went to one of the many panels on VR. As much as the medium has its own merit on being an empathy machine, the power of How to Let Go of the World, and Love reminds me that a mark on a wall, a sketch on paper, words on a page, one still image can incite as much or as little empathy as what the content delivers.
We may have come on separate ships, but we’re in the same boat now (MLK)
We came up to Sundance for work, to host our own salon series, enso’s Big Table, this time convening both filmmakers, content and social platforms, and brands around The power of film to remake the world.
Josh Fox didn’t merely make a film; he is organizing a whole campaign movement in such an exemplary way, demonstrating how to tackle the very challenges we were exchanging around our Big Table that morning. At enso, a lot of our work is propelled by the assertion that the world really only starts working when people have solidarity around the things they care about. The film has created solidarity through disparate stories, through the community screening in the theater, and will continue to do so throughout its distribution in cities and online.
From pang to pining
As a gesture to the launch of his film, I want to share a very personal, short video poem that I call Everything Else Can Wait. It depicts the everyday, cabin life on the a cliff above the Pacific where the tsunami hit and obliterated the surrounding villages five years ago in northern Japan. In the end, nature is a force to be (or we just can’t) reckoned with, but in life we’re not asked to tend with what we can’t control but with the things we can take care of — ourselves, each other, and this little garden we share. So yeah, in what seems both a utopic and dystopic song, I’m already pining for home, our pale blue dot. #LetGoAndLove
Please watch How to Let Go of the World, and Love All the Things That Climate Can’t Change when it comes to your community this spring, and host screenings at your home when it comes on HBO this summer. The film is launching the Let Go, and Love tour on kickstarter. They want to bring this to 100 cities. They will share plans from the national renewable energy labs, and host discussions and workshops to teach people how to go renewable themselves.
Let’s start asking tough questions and begin making challenging decisions on how we as individuals and as a collective might live in this world we share.
