When the French actress Melanie Laurent read a now famous 2012 paper by leading scientists warning that the Earth's climate was reaching a tipping point from which it may never recover, she sat down and wept. But instead of succumbing to fatalism, Laurent -- best known for her role in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" -- went looking for the positive.
With study after study confirming the dire warnings by experts about the state of the biosphere, Laurent and her friend Cyril Dion felt people needed hope. "Demain" (Tomorrow), their feelgood film about how the world can change for the better -- and the inspirational farm, energy and educational pioneers who are pointing the way -- has had cinema audiences on their feet. More than a million people have so far flocked to see it in France alone, where it won the Cesar -- or "French Oscar" -- for the best documentary of the year.
The film shows how new French permaculture techniques can make small organic microfarms 10 times more productive than industrial farming -- and all without the aid of a single piece of petrol-driven machinery. It highlights how major cities like San Francisco are recycling and composting 80 percent of domestic waste -- and making money from it -- while Copenhagen aims to run on renewable energy alone within less than a decade. The US city of Detroit hopes to feed half its population from its booming urban vegetable plots in a country where food travels on average of 2,400 kilometres between farm and plate.
Dion, an environmentalist, said he was overawed by the enthusiasm that has greeted the crowd-funded film in France, Belgium and Switzerland, receiving standing ovations wherever it showed. Many see it as a turning point in the way environmental issues are seen, with the film also raising questions about whether democratic systems need to be rethought to hold energy and industrial interests to account.
While other documentaries -- notably former US vice-president Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" about global warming -- have brought green issues to the multiplexes, none have been as relentlessly upbeat as "Demain". It hails participative democracy and local currency schemes as ways of protecting communities from the worst excesses of the global capitalism.
