Film Synopsis: This Changes Everything

Inspired by Naomi Klein’s eponymous book, This Changes Everything makes the powerful case that responding to the climate crisis may be the best chance we’ve ever had to demand – and build – a better world.

Journalist and filmmaker Avi Lewis’s epic documentary presents seven portraits of communities on the climate front lines – from ranchers in Montana dealing with floods and an oil spill to grandmothers in Greece protesting the arrival of a Canadian gold-processing complex; from fishermen in India rejecting a coal-fired power plant to migrant workers in the Alberta tar sands. Naomi Klein’s impassioned narration is interwoven into these stories of struggle, presenting her take on the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there. It builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better. Don’t change the climate: change the system.

This film was supported by the Bertha Film Fund.