Primary Cast: Tilda Swinton (narrator)
Director: Brian Hill
Screenwriter: Simon Armitage
Producer: Katie Bailiff
Editor: Stuart Briggs
Director of Photography: Roger Chapman, Tony Coldwell, Michael Timney, Wayne Vinten
Executive Producer: Kevin Wall, Kit Williams
Composer: Nitin Sawhney

Driving Climate of Change is the beautiful narration written by British poet Simon Armitage and mellifluously voiced by Tilda Swinton. "We are the renters of this world, not its masters," reminds Pooshkar, a precocious 13-year-old member of a youth environmental defense group in India. He and his fellow voraciously energetic students actively rally against the use of plastics. In Africa, a renaissance man teaches citizens to harness solar power to cook food. In Papua New Guinea, villagers practice sustainable logging to save their rainforests. A woman in London uses her PR savvy to start a successful environmental communications firm. Self-described "hillbillies" in Appalachia battle the big business behind strip mining. In this rich and inspiring documentary, director Brian Hill takes us around the world to find the ordinary people taking action in the fight to save our environment. 

Hill and his cinematographers create a real sense of ambience in each of the countries and communities they visit. Conversations with West Virginians are punctuated by footage of mountaintops surrounding their homes being dynamited; Papua New Guineans talk among the giant trees being decimated by commercial logging. A visit to the Global Seed Vault built in the Norwegian permafrost in Svalbard, Norway is particularly ethereal.

Watch the trailer

 

Brian Hill is a BAFTA-winning filmmaker and managing director of Century Films in the UK. He has made more than 60 films for the BBC, Channel 4, and ITV, including Drinking For England, Feltham Sings, and Songbirds, which was selected for Sundance.

 

In Climate of Change I was trying to make a film about our environment that was not a doom-laden prophecy of impending catastrophe. I felt as though we had been warned enough about the parlous state of the planet. Rather, I wanted to focus on individuals around the world who are actually doing something about climate change, who are taking action rather than paying lip service to environmental concerns. It's probably not possible to make a "feel good" film about climate change but I was determined to make a film featuring inspirational people. 

I also wanted the film to have a poetic quality, a narration that might convey at least some of the wonder of the world rather than gloomy predictions about the end of the earth. It was important to me that the film linked people around the world who are united in their desire to be positive. They might come from different countries and have very different circumstances but we showed that there are people who have one common concern—the earth.