Independent Film Spotlight: Future Weather

How a 13-year-old is giving Al Gore a run for his money, or why indie is alive and well.

Video week continues with something from the depths of indie: Future Weather, a sweet coming-of-age film about the relationship between environmentalism and social hardship — a brilliant addition to our earth-centric essential viewing recommendations.

Laduree is a 13-year-old girl who, in the midst of a forestry experiment, realizes she has to take action to save her hometown from global warming. Except in the process of this epiphany, she gets abandoned by her mother. Tossed over to her grandmother, she is thrown into a depressed rural community.

As Laduree faces her uncertain future, she reimagines her life as a public service announcement, translating her own reality of family struggles into our collective one of environmental apocalypse — a compellingly fresh angle on the sustainability dialogue, if we ever saw one.

Future Weather, from Philadelphia-based duo Jenny Deller and Kristin Fairweather, is a finalist in the Netflix Find Your Voice competition. It is also the winner of Showtime’s Tony Cox Screenwriting Award. Production — sustainable by design — is slated for this fall, with the film set to hit theaters next year.

Life, Visually Dissected

An owl, a worm and a lizard walk into a bar…

The glorious thing about natural habitats is that one organism can house millions of others. And we often seem to forget that — when we stroll by a tree in the park, the only “organism” we’re likely to see in it is an 8-year-old scrambling for the next branch up.

But a recent campaign for WWF (that’s the World Wildlife Fund, not the World Wrestling Federation, ahem) visually dissected the fascinating microcosm of life that exists inside (and on, and under, and around) some of those our flora and fauna stand-bys.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention lately, the complexity of life inside a coral reef won’t surprise you. But it’s still a stride-stopping reminder of just how much we can lose by doing so little to preserve it.

Not unlike Chris Jordan‘s work, the campaign borrows from the revelational capacity of data visualization to inspire deeper environmental awareness through an emotional understanding of an issue that would remain abstract and irrelevant if presented as dry statistics — a visceral bridge between left brain and right brain.

Out of DDB Brazil.

Running The Numbers: Oceanographic Visualization

What 20,500 tuna have to do with your old toothbrush, or how a plastic comb ended up on top of Japan’s most iconic volcano.

We love TED. We love data visualization. We hate environmental demise.

Naturally, we love artist Chris Jordan‘s (remember him?) response to the overlooked but tremendously concerning issue exposed by legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle in her TED Prize wish — overfishing and the rapid decline of oceans’ natural vitality.

In Running The Numbers II, the second installment of his Portraits of Global Mass Culture series, Jordan looks at mass phenomena on a global scale. Again, each image portrays concrete data about a specific issue.

Depicts 270,000 fossilized shark teeth, equal to the estimated number of sharks of all species killed around the world every day for their fins.

Partial zoom

Further zoom

Detail at actual print size

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour.

Partial zoom

Detail of the top of Mt. Fuji

Detail at actual print size

Jordan’s work is both a reminder of and an antidote to our individual sense of insignificance as we face these disturbing global issues with an increasing sense of urgency — we love the idea of juxtaposing the effect of our collective actions with the tiny individual contributions that make them up. It’s a new kind of call for personal responsibility — could that be your old toothbrush at the foot of Mt. Fuji?

We are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Depicts 20,500 tuna, the average number of tuna fished from the world

Partial zoom

Detail at actual print size

For a deeper look at our collective individualism in its cultural context, be sure to check out Jordan’s absolutely brilliant book, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait — it comes with our highest stamp of recommendation.

via @TEDchris

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.