Sundance Doc ‘To The End’ Tells A Bleak Yet Empowering Story About Climate Change

During the 2018 midterm elections, documentary filmmaker Rachel Lears chronicled 4 progressive women who mounted major challenges in opposition to institution Democrats in Congress. One of them was now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose profitable grassroots marketing campaign shook up the political panorama and put the social gathering’s outdated guard on discover.

As Lears was wrapping up the movie, 2019’s “Knock Down the House,” she knew she needed to maintain following Ocasio-Cortez. Around that very same time, within the fall of 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change launched its most sobering report but, warning that world leaders had been quickly running out of time to stop environmental disaster.

So Lears turned her attention towards the politics of local weather change, following Ocasio-Cortez in addition to three Green New Deal activists and progressive leaders: Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement, Alexandra Rojas of Justice Democrats and Rhiana Gunn-Wright of the Roosevelt Institute. The result’s “To the End,” which premiered this week on the Sundance Film Festival.

In a dialog with HuffPost, Lears talked concerning the significance of all 4 of the documentary’s protagonists being younger women of coloration, how the COVID-19 pandemic made the themes much more grimly resonant, and why the activists preserve optimism and momentum within the face of a lot defeat, intransigence, and being frequently underestimated.

After finishing “Knock Down the House,” Lears stated she needed to proceed exploring women and women of coloration in management. In explicit, it turned clear these new generations of leaders would come up in opposition to the strain of “how you leverage the power that you have while trying to build more at the same time, and confronting what the limits of the power that you have,” she stated.

“I was very interested in what it was going to look like, not only for Ocasio-Cortez to enter Congress and confront the realities of whatever she was going to find there in the institutions of our government,” Lears defined.

“But once the Green New Deal started exploding, it also became clear that these other young women who are in positions of leadership in this movement were also going to be facing a similar challenge around leadership and power, and just what is it like to have one foot in the door of the halls of power, but not to have enough power to fully shape your own agenda.”

In addition, as Lears identified, it’s “not a coincidence that these four leaders and many young leaders in the climate justice movement are women of color.”

“Young people, women and people of color are, across the world, the most affected by the climate crisis at the front lines,” she stated. “Women of color have been leading movements as long as there have been movements, but they don’t always get memorialized in the official histories. And that’s starting to change, obviously, but it’s incredibly important to recognize the work that these people are doing and to acknowledge their central role in this.”

Lears’ prior movie “Knock Down the House” was equally noteworthy in how, not like many marketing campaign documentaries, its topics had been women and women of coloration. For the filmmaker, there are a number of the explanation why this issues. On one degree, it’s highly effective and significant for folks to see themselves represented.

“On the other hand, I also think there’s a really interesting cultural shift that happens when people from dominant groups start to identify with people from marginalized groups as characters, because that’s the opposite of what I grew up with, identifying with male characters in movies and television because there just weren’t enough female characters,” she stated.

“So I’m trying to make movies that are constructed in a way to really draw people into empathy and identifying with this character-based narrative journey. And I think that can have really profound cultural implications when it’s cast this way.”

The occasions in “To the End” span the final three years. Like the whole lot else on the earth, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced quite a lot of logistical challenges for Lears, the documentary’s protagonists and the manufacturing workforce. At the identical time, she found that narratively, the pandemic was all a “massive validation of the themes that we had already been exploring.”

“We had already been exploring the way that crises play out along the lines of economic and racial inequality,” Lears stated. “Boom, the pandemic hits. And that is just blatantly obvious to everyone that that’s what is happening.”

One of the movie’s main storylines is the push and pull between activists and elected officers. The activists acknowledge they’re coping with a deeply flawed political system, but additionally perceive the necessity to work inside it with the intention to obtain actual change. And Ocasio-Cortez performs an important function as a liaison between the activists and the outdated guard Democratic leaders.

“To actually get what we demand requires us to work with institutions and established powers that we loathe,” Ocasio-Cortez says within the movie. “Sometimes, I feel like my job is to get my hands dirty so that community organizers and activists don’t have to.”

In one other scene, Prakash equally displays on how it may be “too icky” to cope with flawed and corrupt establishments, and whether or not to have interaction with political energy is a supply of debate inside the progressive motion.

But “as mind-blowingly frustrating as it can be,” Lears stated, there’s nonetheless a necessity to take action.

“At the top of the day, we’d like each. We want electoral actions and community-based actions and labor actions,” she stated. “Electoral politics isn’t the only arena for deciding these things. But it is important. And as Varshini says, our enemy, and she’s talking about the fossil fuel industry, is working out their political strategy and spending billions of dollars on it.”

The documentary tells a compelling story concerning the challenges of progressive organizing and making an attempt to stay steadfast when it’s onerous to not really feel cynical and demoralized. But because the local weather disaster has grown direr and extra folks expertise the results of rising sea ranges, worsening air and water air pollution, and intensifying pure disasters, “we don’t have the luxury of cynicism,” Lears stated. It’s one thing that clearly drives the protagonists in “To the End.”

“That sort of visceral distaste for politics, I think it’s connected to the cynicism that so many people feel when they watch the gridlock and just the way that so many people in Congress will prioritize their donors or corporate interests above what the majority of working people in this country actually want to see,” Lears stated.

“I can see why people feel distaste for that. I do myself. But it’s really interesting to follow the story of people who are trying to walk that line and trying to stay true to their values while engaging within the system. And all of the people featured in this film are; they get tons of flack, literally from left, right and center.”

“They’re being criticized from people on all parts of the political spectrum for being too much of this, too little of that. But they’re trying to be idealistic and pragmatic at the same time,” Lears continued. “I think watching these courageous young women really live through that is an incredibly emotional roller coaster.”