Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change. Inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.
Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.
Over the course of 90 minutes, viewers will meet...
Crystal, a young indigenous leader in Tar Sands country, as she fights for access to a restricted military base in search of answers about an environmental disaster in progress.
Mike and Alexis, a Montana goat ranching couple who see their dreams coated in oil from a broken pipeline. They respond by organizing against fossil fuel extraction in their beloved Powder River Basin, and forming a new alliance with the Northern Cheyenne tribe to bring solar power to the nearby reservation.
Melachrini, a housewife in Northern Greece where economic crisis is being used to justify mining and drilling projects that threaten the mountains, seas, and tourism economy. Against the backdrop of Greece in crisis, a powerful social movement rises.
Jyothi, a matriarch in Andhra Pradesh, India who sings sweetly and battles fiercely along with her fellow villagers, fighting a proposed coal-fired power plant that will destroy a life-giving wetland. In the course of this struggle, they help ignite a nationwide movement.
The extraordinary detail and richness of the cinematography in This Changes Everything provides an epic canvas for this exploration of the greatest challenge of our time. Unlike many works about the climate crisis, this is not a film that tries to scare the audience into action: it aims to empower. Provocative, compelling, and accessible to even the most climate-fatigued viewers, This Changes Everything will leave you refreshed and inspired, reflecting on the ties between us, the kind of lives we really want, and why the climate crisis is at the centre of it all.
Will this film change everything? Absolutely not. But you could, by answering its call to action.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
How to make a climate film for people (like me) who at this point are weary of the whole genre?
How to make a film based on a book that hasn’t been written yet?
How to make a film about humanity’s existential crisis that nonetheless leaves the viewer with a credible sense of hope?
These were just a few of the tricky questions I had to answer when I started making This Changes Everything. I found the answers in people, in the hundreds who shared their stories and lives with us during the course of shooting this film, over four years, in nine countries and five continents.
While my friends and family know that once I get going, it can be hard to shut me up, most of my professional life has been spent listening. And listening to the people in this film was what changed everything for me.
In the fierce dignity and moral clarity of communities fighting destructive fossil fuel projects, in the drama of their struggles, I saw that a climate film doesn’t have to be about polar bears. In the way the people I met connected the dots between the economic system and the havoc it is wreaking on their lives and the planet, I heard Naomi’s book come to life, even while she was still in the process of writing it. And in watching the emergence of a new climate movement - breaking out of silos, making new alliances, and building the next economy in the rubble of the old one - I found hope growing in the cracks of our broken system.
Making this film has been the most difficult and thrilling creative work of my life so far. My most passionate hope is that it can be useful, can help people burst out of isolation and avoidance and find a way to engage.
Because to change everything, we need everyone.
Community Partners