“I was an Al Gore climate leader,” Mark Forstmann shares with FilmInk. “Inconvenient Truth came out in 2005 and he teamed up with the Australian Conservation Foundation and trained up 50-60 leaders, like Cate Blanchett and I, to go around to town halls and primary schools and give little talks.”
18 years on, global warming remains at the forefront of the Australian political and environmental conversation, much of which has been spearheaded by Tim Flannery, who is the focus of documentary Climate Changers, written and produced by Forstmann, directed by Johan Gabrielsson.
“I read Tim’s book, The Weather Makers, a year before Gore’s film came out. I was sort of activated then, when I realised the magnitude of the problem. A bunch of years later, during the Black Summer bushfires, Johan and I teamed up to communicate this mess,” Forstmann says.
“I always thought it was interesting that the only time people seemed to care about climate change was when there were massive bushfires or some other natural disaster,” Gabrielsson says. “I live about 100 meters away from Mark, and during that time, we heard a lot of stories from our neighbours about how their swimming pools were covered in ash from the bushfires. Then we went to Tim’s house on the Hawkesbury River, and it was paradise. He started telling us about how the burlaps were gone, and everything was changing there as well. That’s when I got interested in telling a story about climate change, and how it is happening, but we don’t realise it because it impacts us on a smaller scale.”
The filmmakers’ collaboration with Flannery began with a bid to learn more about the Conference of the Parties (COP).
“When we approached him, we wanted to find out more about the COP,” Forstmann recalls. “We wanted to find out why our leaders weren’t making these changes. Tim had been to 6 of these things and the one we focused on in the film was the Copenhagen COP, which was the one that failed. We went on the journey with Tim to find these leaders and uncover what was wrong.”
The Copenhagen COP proved to be the perfect place to investigate the issues in climate leadership.
“Tim has a lot of experience with COPs, and he said that this one was different to all the others he had attended,” says Gabrielsson. “There were a lot of voices that were trying to be heard and our leaders can’t ignore them anymore. I think that is what our film highlights; that there are a lot of voices in the climate crisis and if you really want to make change, then you need to incorporate all of them.”
Despite the doom and gloom rhetoric that surrounds climate crisis conversations, Climate Changers leaves audiences with a glimmer of hope.
“I agree that everything is moving slowly, but as we show in the film, there are things that the everyday person can do to make a real change,” Gabrielsson says. “In today’s day and age, it actually makes more economical sense to get an electrical car or to electrify our homes. It’s cheaper to do that now, which is what separates this era from all the others. Hopefully, that starts a revolution, or at least that will help us get closer to our targets.”
“All 15 people that we interview in the film are leaders in their own right,” says Forstmann. “They all have a unique point of view, or recipe, for what to do. I think anyone who watches the film will get something from someone in the film that will resonate with them and give them some guidance. With our film, we hope it would act as a catalyst for leadership.”
For audiences that are jaded with the climate conversation, or feel uneducated on the matter, the gentle guidance of Flannery will help.
“Seeing him deal with all these people, I realised he is a humble listener,” Gabrielsson says. “Even when people were very aggressive with him, he still had that aura of extreme coolness. I was so impressed with that. I would say his gentleness and his temperament set the tone for the film. He’s not dictating what anyone should do, and we tapped into that, which permeated through the film.”
Climate Changers is having a national screening and live-streamed Q&A event at over 20 cinemas around the country, this Sunday, September 17. Go to https://climatechangersmovie.com/ for more details.
