by Julian Wood
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gameau, kids, corporate executives, farmers
Intro:
… moving and uplifting …
As the song says, “I believe the children are our future”. This is undeniably true, unless of course there is no worthwhile future for them to inherit. To take this problem seriously is to take children seriously and also to acknowledge their unique stake in being part of the critique of how we live now. They will inherit the consequences of our inaction.
Damon Gameau has made a successful transition from actor to documentary maker. In 2024, he made That Sugar Film a sort of Supersize Me effort in which he experimented with his sugar levels and showed how the white poison is in almost every processed food. From there, it was a short hop to thinking about what we grow as well as what we eat. In 2019, he also added the future dimension by trying to make an imaginative and positive response to the climate change threat with 2040.
And now comes Future Council. Once again, the canvas is small and intimate and is partly borne aloft by his likeable persona. The other vital ingredient, in a world where the sheer scale of the environmental threat freezes most of us like a rabbit in the headlamps, is positivity. Here Gameau and his co-creator Jimmy James White have assembled a small bunch of kids around 11 years old. At the beginning of the film, there is a quick segment suggesting that thousands of kids replied to their call out. So, it was hard to whittle them down to the 8 candidates that make the final selection. It has to be said that, though they come from disparate lands (from Europe to Australia), they seem a pretty middle class and mostly white bunch. Still, there was no need for ‘quota casting’ inclusivity here and all the kids featured are natural talents. They are very watchable and often highly articulate young humans.
The shape is simple. Gameau hires an old yellow school bus and drives the kids around Europe. The film stages meetings with various companies that will agree to meet the little climate warriors. Coca Cola and Pepsi – two of the biggest polluters – decline to take part, but Nestle the giant of global confectioners does agree to meet them. The kids are undaunted by the size of the company and in a key filmed encounter they give the genial CEO a frank and fair assessment of how he and his ilk are the problem.
The film is short in duration and in a way quite slight too. Also, few people tuning in would find much to disagree with in terms of its basic anti-waste and pro-nature stance. Still, the kids are very engaging and, as suggested, the film manages to be both moving and uplifting. That is welcome in itself. Take your kids or let them take you.
