Decaying Neighbourhood
I’m going to break with my format of non-curatorial blog posting because I really think this film is essential viewing. I can’t stress enough how important it is. It’s called “The Planet“, it was directed by Michael Stenberg, Johan Söderberg and Linus Torell. It’s a documentary about the myriad ways that we are destroying the Earth. I saw it at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2007.
It threw me into a deep depression that lasted for about three days before I snapped out of it (I’m making it sound fantastic, aren’t I?), and spurred me to stop “talking the talk” and actually act. After watching The Planet, I resolved to heavily reduce my intake of meat (to one meal-with-meat a week at most), and to stop flying as much as possible. That winter I took a bus to Toronto. (For what it’s worth, there is little discussion about the environmental impacts of meat production in the film, and there aren’t many specifics about air travel - I knew all that beforehand.) The film takes a “big picture” view of things, so it covers a lot of bases - but can’t get into a great deal of detail. I knew some of what it covers already, but seeing it so artfully compiled into one place was a real shocker. There’s even a brilliant section about the human response to all this impending disaster: denial.
I’ve been looking for this film since I saw it. The reason why I’m posting about this now is because I just discovered that someone has put the film up on Youtube. It’s in 9 parts, and is just over 80 minutes long. For convenience, I’ll embed all the parts here, with all but the first part beyond the jump. It’s good. Please watch it, and show your friends.
