Screened out?

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Considering the amazing success achieved by the film of Al Gores global warming lecture, An Inconvenient Truth - which claims to be the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time it is surprising that the current rash of film festivals in London does not boast a single film about climate change.

It is not that the festival organisers are unaware of the problem. The Birds Eye View festival (8-14 March), for example, claims to be the first carbon-neutral festival: it is offsetting all the emissions from festival-related flights, through Climate Care.

The gesture puts it ahead of the field, which includes the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and the Tongues on Fire Film Festival.*

An absence of climate change topics is less surprising for the forthcoming, the Images of Black Women Festival, the London Australian Film Festival, the Polish Film Festival and even the first London International Documentary Festival.

But thats a lot of serious film, and climate change is a serious issue. Apart from the unexpected success of the Gore film weve had one attempt at a blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow. Global warming presents difficulties for directors because of the shortage of strong visual material: its hard to film rising sea levels measured in centimetres. That just leaves talking heads.

Another factor is the time-lag between major events and plays, films and books about such events. Literature about the Nigerian civil war and Vietnam took years to appear; the four serious films on the Rwandan genocide appeared almost a decade after the atrocities.

If the media angle on the recent report by the UN-sponsored climate change panel is correct that the significance of the report was that it finally closed the debate on whether global warming is real we may have to wait another six-to-10 years before art follows science.

Fortunately, radio and TV are quicker off the mark. The last couple of years have seen a number of excellent programmes on global warming, and a glance at OneWorld UKs London Events page shows a steady flow of broadcasts (and an even steadier flow of lectures - illustrating the way the media lags behind science). This week alone there are two major TV programmes, even if one of them is anti, arguing the case for sunspots instead of emissions as the cause and both focus on controversies about climate change rather than an assessment of the implications.

To encourage film-makers to tackle the facts and likely effects of global warming, as well as the measures needed to halt it, environmental NGOs may have to sponsor film festivals of their own, or at least offer special prizes as part of established festivals.

* A handful of films from this months rush of festivals cover related issues, the most obvious being Invisible, described as a hypnotic journey to the high arctic [which] follows research into the far-reaching effects of industrialisation on the environment, and considers the extent of their consequences, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lees dissection of the impact of Hurricane Katrina, and perhaps if oil is the real reason for the invasion of Iraq - a bipartisan inquiry into the workings of the military industrial complex and the rise of the American Empire, Why We Fight.