Global Age of Stupid premiere

Just in case you didn't know it's on the 21st / 22nd of September...







It's going to be one hell of a premiere!! www.ageofstupid.net

PS. Sorry about the silence, lots of things going on. I'll be back soon...

A Delicate Balance

This year seems to be a year for brilliant independent films. Watching “A delicate balance” by Aaron Scheibner was a life-changing event for me.

So what’s it all about, well it’s about food, nutrition and the escalating health problems we see in affluent countries – not just cancer, heart disease and obesity, but also autoimmune disorders too like diabetes, crohns disease and all the many different ways the body can attack itself.

The film is full of interesting things I hadn’t even thought to think about regarding the food that I eat. The facts are backed up by years of research by medical doctors and scientists at leading educational research institutions across the globe.

Before the film I was vegetarian (but still ate dairy in the form of cheese and eggs). So obviously, I had thought about the animal welfare aspects of my food and with the remaining food stuffs left to me I tried to eat a relatively balanced diet. My main reason for still eating dairy and eggs was so that I could get enough protein (I tried to ignore the welfare aspects of cheese, and eggs were always free-range). But this film isn’t about animal welfare (much). This film made me concentrate on the consequences of my diet on my health and it was incredibly eye opening. The result is that I am now vegan – no meat, no fish, no milk, no eggs. The good news is that I can get all the vitamins, minerals and everything I need, including protein and B12, from a vegan diet. I am about 10 days into the new diet and feeling great!

So friends and family, I will make you watch this film too, you may borrow my copy. Everyone else, I urge to either buy a copy of the film or go to a screening you can also pay to watch in online.

This film is about you and your health, if you care about yourself, you need to watch this film.

You can watch the trailer on the delicate balance website (the film is also covers meat production and climate change).

In Transition film - online now

I've just watched the online screening of the "In Transition" film. It's not the final version, but it looked pretty good to me, a little bit of tweaking and I'm sure it will be a brilliant. It's only online for a few days, so catch it now, or else you'll have to wait for the finished product. It's about an hour long.

I'm familiar with the "Transition" concept, so I'd be really interested to hear what anyone who is new to the subject thinks of the film.

The idea of creating a positive vision of the future I think is powerful and necessary, but for me methodology the transition movement is generally using to get people to think about the future is a bit "new age" - but granted it does work (it tends to revolve around group meditation, which, if you are not used to meditation, either on your own or in a group, is uncomfortable - I just can't imagine that going down well with the majority of the people in my town!). The practical aspects, great. Some fantastic projects highlighted in the film.

By the way the film didn't play in Firefox. It was fine in Internet Explorer.

If you want to comment on the film to Rob, post your comments on the Transition Culture In Transition Film blog post.

If you want to watch the full 350 degrees animation, you can find it at www.350.org/animation.

'In Transition' film

"In Transition" is an hour long film about the worldwide Transition movement. It will premiere online at 1.45pm on the May 23rd - but there is nothing to see at that link yet...

For those of you not in the UK, here are the dates and times for your part of the world. I hope you can make it.

In the meantime here is the trailer.

Age of Stupid Premiere

We were there! It was fantastic.

We went to the people's premiere in Cambridge (the film was screened simultaneously in 60+ UK venues - world record!), with a couple of friends. The atmosphere was great.

The film was brilliant (I know, I would say that, but really it was).

I urge you all to go and see The Age of Stupid, when it reaches a cinema near you sometime after the 20th of March.

In the film, Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? All the footage from 2008 and before is actual footage, ie real, happened, not made up. It is very powerful. The main focus is climate change, but it also weaves in other issues like peak oil, poverty and consumerism by focusing on people in different parts of the world and their various struggles to make the world a better place.

After the film there was a live hook up with the premiere in London where Franny Armstrong (director) and Lizzie Gillett (producer) chatted with Pete and others in the film and everyone gave Ed Milliband a bit of a grilling about doing the right thing at the UN Climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Pete declared passionately that he would hand back his OBE and ask the Queen to disband the government if the government are generally "Stupid" about all things climate change related, like the giving the go ahead for the coal-burning power plant at Kingsnorth and the 3rd runway at Heathrow airport.

All of which you can see here:


The President of the Maldives got a standing ovation for his speech. He stated (via video) that the Maldives will be carbon-neutral within 10 years. Wow. You can watch the video now:

Message from the President of the Maldives from Age of Stupid on Vimeo
or at www.notstupid.org

The evening ended back in Cambridge where Rosemay Randall (Cambridge Carbon Footprint) and Tony Juniper (FOI director for 8 years) gave a couple of excellent speeches. Then Craig (Transition House) persuaded me that I needed to have my photo taken with Tony for this blog so here we are! (and yes I am wearing a dress!! well it was a premiere).

The Age of Stupid at a cinema near you in ...

The age of stupid is an independent film that has been crowd funded.