This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything

By Alberto Sclaverano

Documentary links the climate crisis with the flaws of the economic system.

Film Review

Canadian activist and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis’s (Avram David Lewis) 2015 movie This Changes Everything is an effective analysis of the climate crisis and its link to economic inequality, all told through the eyes of the people who are at the front line of the struggle to try to change things and avoid disasters.

It is based on the book by Canadian author, filmmaker and social activist Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), who also narrates the film. She is the wife and frequent collaborator of Lewis. Klein, of course, way more famous than her husband, will be forever linked to the alter- globalization movement of the beginning of the XXI Century. Her 1999 book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is widely considered the closest thing that we have to an actual “manifesto” of the anti-globalization movement. It denounced rising global inequality and the exploitation of developing nations by large multinational corporations. Klein continued her discourse in another famous book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).

Klein has often touched on the theme of the climate crisis during her career, but with the 2014 essay, she puts it at the very center of her reflection. Klein argues that the neoliberal economic model and the unchecked globalized path to development are not sustainable for the Earth and the ecosystem, and that, to deal with the climate crisis, we need to try to rethink our economic model. Lewis’s film is interesting because he and Klein do not follow “Al Gore’s footsteps”, as many would have imagined. This Changes Everything is not Naomi Klein’s An Inconvenient Truth.

While the film reflects all the topics presented in the book, the authors choose to illustrate them through real examples. So, Lewis’ images and Klein’s voice guide us to a series of real and inspiring stories of common people who have proved that it is possible to tackle the climate crisis, even when the governments seem to be lazy or even denialists on the topic, and at the same time it seems to show a different path to development and to the economy, a one in which

mutual support and solidarity are more important than the traditional capitalist mechanisms.

The film is constructed in an almost episodic-like structure: in the forests of the Canadian state of Alberta, a young Indigenous activist fights to gain access to a secret military base. In Greece, while the austerity imposed on the country after the debt crisis shows all its dramatic consequences, a housewife fights against the mining and drilling project of a multinational corporation that would create great damage to the land in which her community lives. Something similar then happens in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where local women oppose the construction of a coal-fired power station. These are just two of the many stories contained in Lewis’s movie. Some American critics have not particularly liked the film, accusing Lewis and Klein of adopting excessive rhetoric and having too much anti-capitalistic point of view. But a thing remains clear: the stories narrated by Klein are real, and it is difficult to remain impassive in front of them. There is also a clear link between the most extreme excesses of the neoliberal model and the climate crisis.

The movie does not offer a clear alternative economic model, nor does it argue explicitly for a return to something closer to social democracy or democratic socialism. But it helps us to reflect that something is wrong with the current development path and that even the smaller people, such as the ones featured in the stories, could make a difference. This is the real lesson of the movie: everyone can make something, even if the general economic structure above seems at times to be designed to destroy the planet and the environment.