Cinema Politica will screen the movie The Age of Stupid next week.
Blurring the boundary between sci-fi and documentary, Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid peers back in time to lament our current inaction on climate change.
The Age of Stupid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father, The Usual Suspects, Brassed Off) as a man living in the devastated future world of 2055, looking back at old footage from our time and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
The film begins in the year 2055 in a world ravaged by catastrophic climate change – London is flooded, Sydney is burning, Las Vegas has been swallowed up by desert, the Amazon rainforest has burnt up, snow has vanished from the Alps, and nuclear war has laid waste to India.
An unnamed archivist (Postlethwaite) is entrusted with the safekeeping of humanity’s surviving store of art and knowledge.
Alone in his vast repository off the coast of the largely ice-free Arctic, he reviews archive footage from back “when we could have saved ourselves,” trying to discern where it all went wrong.
Amid news reports of the gathering effects of climate change and global civilization teetering towards destruction, he alights on six stories of individuals whose lives in the early years of the 21st century seem to illustrate aspects of the impending catastrophe.
These six stories take the form of interweaving documentary segments that report on the lives of real people in the present, and switch the film’s narrative form from fiction to fact.
• The Age of Stupid screen Thursday, April 19 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Maple Ridge Municipal Hall, 11995 Haney Place. Admission is free.