The Grab
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
A harsh documentary enlightens the darkest aspects of the human response to the climate crisis
By Alberto Sclaverano
The movie brings to light one of the most disturbing aspects of the ongoing climate crisis, and, for its style and goals, can be classified as a piece of investigative journalism, in the tradition of the best Anglo-Saxon products of its kind (think about Michael Moore’s documentaries for comparison).
American filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite reached a certain global notoriety with the 2022 documentary The Grab. After the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it was released worldwide in theaters and VOD platforms, but only since spring 2024.
At the center of the story is the work done by a group of reporters from the Center for Investigative Reporting. They travel around the world, “following the money”, and carefully document the race by both private and political actors to take control of vital resources, especially concerning food and water supply, in order to be in a position of strength in the case of a future ecosystem collapse driven by climate change.
These state and non-state actors are nothing new, but what they are shown to do there is probably unknown to the majority of people. Everything is described and illustrated in very detailed ways, and any information that is available and not covered by military secrecy is brought to light by Ms. Cowperthwaite and her team.
For example, we are asked to see how American private military contractor Blackwater acts in order to gain land and a strategic position in the resource supply chain in Africa.
We see things that seem incredible, such as Putin’s Russia hiring US cowboys to work in the cold region of the country, knowing that in the future agriculture could go through a severe crisis due to the climate crisis, and that some of the current arid areas in Russia’s farthest region could instead become productive.
From the Communist Party of China to Saudi Arabia’s private funds, from the US government to the Russian regime, every actor is shown to play its game in order to maximize the available resources and to control future distribution centers concerning water and food.
There are no big conspiracies or secret plans here, just international actors that have already accepted that the Earth ecosystem’s collapse in the near future is a possibility, and so they must be ready to exploit the situation and to maximize their force (and weaken the potential rivals). What’s really disturbing is that any cooperative path to stop climate change seems to be nonexistent in this scheme. The global population’s wellness and human rights are excluded. The climate crisis is taken as a settled reality.
The Grab is less a cinematic experience and more a collection of crude data. It does not resemble the one-man show offered by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, nor does it have the classical “heavy-activism” approach of other climate change-related documentaries. Its cold approach is what makes it more effective and sadder, though. There are millions of people who work every day to stop the climate crisis, from common citizens to people at the government levels. So, why does it seem to continue growing more dangerous?
Well, The Grab offers a serious answer, even if it is a tragic one. There is a piece of the world’s elite and economic/military powers that simply have not been interested in solving climate change, and they are instead already working to survive in a post-ecosystem’s collapse planet.
It is clear in the film that, if we want to leave a better world to the future generation, we need to understand that these actors are part of the problems as much as the CO2 emissions in the atmosphere or the plastic in the Oceans.
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