How to Let Go of the World (and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change)
(USA, 125 min.)
Dir. Josh Fox
World Showcase (International Premiere)
How to Let Go of the World has a sly approach to the subject of climate change. Josh Fox’s follow-up to his Gasland films plays as a satirical epic with a tone of jocular despair. The movie, opening on Fox dancing manically to Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, recalls an environmentalist victory and then shows him crash when confronted by the magnitude of climate change.
Explosive montages of devastation, intercut with terse warnings from environmentalists, drive home an agonizing truth: it’s too late. We are lurching toward a Mad Max nightmare of rising sea level refugees, scarcity, and the end of civilization.
“I don’t know about you,” Fox says to us, “but I’m ready to watch some cat videos.” We see some cat videos and a stunning overhead of Fox prone in a forest, a helpless dot. He manages to pull himself up, however, and into a quest for people who don’t get paralyzed by despair. The journey takes him from Iceland to Samoa, into areas where “intoxicating beauty” is endangered, and idealists delight in their battles.
Fox’s discovery of “things climate can’t change,” from resilience and innovation to love, leads him to an epiphany. How to Let Go of the World is a dynamic doc with an insistently hopeful resolution that not everybody will buy, not to mention a two-hour plus running time that starts to feel inflated.
How to Let Go of the World (and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change) screens:
-Wednesday, May 4 at TIFF Bell Lightbox at 12:45 PM
-Saturday, May 7 at TIFF Bell Lightbox at 9:15 PM
Hot Docs runs April 28 – May 8. Visit www.hotdocs.ca for more information.
