The Age of Stupid: The huge implications of climate change are given dynamic form in Franny Armstrong’s essential new feature
By Gareth Evans
Vertigo Magazine (United Kingdom)
Following on from her remarkable campaigning documentaries McLibel and Drowned Out, film-maker Franny Armstrong has spent the last few years making her most important film yet. The Age of Stupid is a docu-drama about climate change, ecological collapse and the end of human civilisation. Starring Pete Postlethwaite and produced by John Battsek (One Day in September) via a participatory funding structure and with a huge cadre of supporters and volunteers, it seeks to transform cinematic representation of the greatest threat facing human society.
As George Monbiot has observed, the film “promises to make a big impact. It follows the lives of six people - from the head of a new Indian airline to a Nigerian fisherwoman who has to use Omo to scrub the oil off her catch - caught up in the politics of climate breakdown. It is a captivating and constantly surprising film: the first successful dramatisation of climate change to reach the big screen.”
Armstrong and her team are extraordinarily dedicated image activists, taking their crucial films to huge numbers of people with an energy and determination that is hard to match. For The Age of Stupid, they are developing educational and outreach strategies on a scale as yet unseen.
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