The Age of Stupid
89' (United Kingdom)
Director:  Fanny Armstrong
Producer:  Lizzy Gillett

Description:

It’s the year 2055 and runaway climate change has ravaged the planet. Pete is the founder of The Global Archive, a storage facility located in the (now melted) Arctic, preserving all of humanity’s achievements in the hope that the planet might one day be habitable again. Or that intelligent life may arrive and make use of all that we’ve achieved. He pulls together clips of “archive” news and documentary from 1950-2008 to build a message showing what went wrong and why. The film uses real documentary footage to move between six main stories that range from Hurricane Katrina to melting Alpine glaciers. This ambitious documentary/drama/animation set in the devastated world of the future, asks the question: “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance?”

Biography: 

Franny Armstrong’s first documentary, McLibel, told the inside story of the infamous McDonald’s libel trial and has been included in the British Film Institute’s prestigious series, “Ten Documentaries Which Changed The World.” Franny’s second feature doc, Drowned Out (2002), followed an Indian family who chose to stay at home and drown rather than make way for the Narmada Dam and was nominated for Best Documentary at the British Independent Film Awards 2004. During the McLibel decade, Franny made two climate change films—Baked Alaska, about the ironies of drilling for oil in a place which is melting ten times faster than the rest of the world, and Going Under, about rising sea levels in the Pacfic. Sadly the latter was never finished as Franny got so spectacularly dumped while filming in Tuvalu she was never able to look at the footage again. The silver lining of the sorry experience was that Mark Lynas was promoted overnight from climate change colleague to Pillar of Support and became the co-writer of The Age of Stupid as well.

Contact Information:

Spanner Films
109 St Pancras Way
LONDON NW1 0RD
UK
E-mail: info@ageofstupid.net
Web site: www.theageofstupid.net