The Age of Stupid (2009)

A future archivist looks at old footage from the year 2008 to understand why humankind failed to address climate change.

Director:

Franny Armstrong

Writer:

Franny Armstrong

Stars:

Pete Postlethwaite, Jeh Wadia, Alvin DuVernay

1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview:
Pete Postlethwaite	...	The Archivist
Jeh Wadia	...	Himself
Alvin DuVernay	...	Himself
Layefa Malini	...	Herself
Jamila Bayyoud	...	Herself
Piers Guy	...	Himself
Lisa Guy	...	Herself
Fernand Pareau	...	Himself

Storyline

This ambitious documentary/drama/animation hybrid stars Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the devastated world of the future, asking the question: "Why didn't we stop climate change when we still had the chance?" He looks back on footage of real people around the world in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place.

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Plot Keywords:

runaway climate change | environmental protest | geopolitics | oil industry | consumerism | 

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Taglines:

Why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance?

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Genres:

Documentary | History | War

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Details

Official Sites:

Official site Official site [jp]

Country:

UK

Language:

English French

Release Date:

20 August 2009 (New Zealand)

Also Known As:

A Era da Estupidez

Filming Locations:

Cornwall, England, UK

Box Office

Budget:

£650,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

£101,752 (UK) (20 March 2009)

Gross:

£101,752 (UK) (20 March 2009)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Spanner Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

92 min 89 min (European Film Market)

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Goofs

At the end of a timeline depicting the disasters Earth has to endure thanks to man's effect on global warming, an image of Earth is shown. Despite all talk of melting ice caps and rising sea levels, Earth's land mass looks exactly as it does when the film was made.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Archivist of the future: Welcome to the global Ark-ive, a vast storage structure located 800 km north of Norway. It contains the artwork from every national museum. There are pickled animals, stacked up, two by two; every film, every book, every scientific report, all stored on banks of servers. But the conditions we're experiencing now were actually caused by our behavior in the period leading up to 2015. In other words: we could have saved ourselves. We could have saved ourselves, but we didn't.

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Connections

Featured in Pauw & Witteman: Episode #4.11 (2009)

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Soundtracks

"A Life in Ashes"
Written by Lee Tibbetts, Andy Hutton & Paul Fowler
Performed by Dragnerve
Under License from Dragnerve

User Reviews

The human face of something confronting

The Age Of Stupid has just opened on 78 screens across the UK - a remarkable feat for a genre-defying independent feature made on a shoe string, funded by ordinary households and distributed with a launch budget of just £130,000. To put this in perspective, An Inconvenient Truth opened in 2006 on just 18 screens and a typical UK-wide release spends around £650,000 telling people to go and see their film.

So why all the fuss?

Four years ago McLibel director Fanny Amstrong and producer Lizzie Gillett set about making a documentary called (at the time) Crude, which charted the ugly side of the oil industry. Fast forward to 2009 and the project has finally emerged as a surprisingly human and touching call-to-arms about climate change called Age Of Stupid.

The film opens in 2055 with Pete Postlethwaite, archivist of a ruined earth, looking back at images of the present day, trying to answer the question of why humanity didn't save itself when it had the chance. Archival news material and animated sequences are used to provide background and context, but the focus is on documentary stories of real people facing the effects of our hunger for fossil fuels.

As a result, the film does not labour under the burden of attempting to sway the undecided through facts and figures - though it's possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.

As we explore the ageing archivist's question, we encounter "not in my back yard" anti-wind farm protesters, committed climate change activists and an entrepreneur who dreams of ending poverty by starting India's third budget airline. Blame is ultimately laid at the feet of our culture of consumerism, and the implication is that profound social changes will be required to survive the present age - poignantly exemplified in a sequence involving Alvin DuVernay, a hurricane Katrina survivor who, having lost all of his possessions, philosophically reflects on what it took for him to realise what was actually important to him.

At the time of writing, around half of the IMDb votes have given the film a rating of 9 or 10 and around a quarter have given it rating of 1. This polarisation is not about artistic merit, but between those for whom the film has deeply resonated and those who find it confronting and uncomfortable.

I've read some complaints about the film being preachy, and it is certainly true that there is forceful criticism of – say – Shell's operations in the Niger delta and the Iraq war. There is no attempt to present any positive outcome of these interventions, but then I'm not expecting a rush of filmmakers wanting to fill this particular gap in the market.

In general the voices of dissent come from the mouths of those directly affected, and indeed it is the human face of these stories that is one of the film's engaging strengths. History's witness is not always the great orator we want it to be, but over 90 minutes the film manages to maintain a good pace and link the various threads together.

The Age Of Stupid has dispensed with convention in a multitude of ways, not the least of which is the way it has forced its way onto our screens, seemingly through sheer force of will alone. Ultimately the merit of the film is not about the quality of editing or its performances, but its transformational potential. I genuinely think that many viewers will leave the cinema and, like Alvin DuVernay, start to question the world which surrounds them, and it is this quality which makes The Age Of Stupid a truly remarkable film.