Caleb Klaces writes: The Age of Stupid uses a dramatic, fictional character to frame a series of apparently disparate contemporary documentaries. Pete Postlethwaite’s man on a chopper looking back from the future, as well as pithy animated sequences explaining the scientific, economic and sociological facts and figures, connects the people …
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Pete Postlethwaite
Ed Miliband, Mark Lynas, Pete Postlethwaite & Franny Armstrong
If anybody hasn’t seen this, here’s Franny Armstrong, Mark Lynas and Pete Postlethwaite ambushing Miliband at the London premiere of Age of Stupid last weekend. It needs to be said, Miliband was there, he takes it on the chin and responds well. The political reality is that until movement that Armstrong and others are building really achieves a critical mass, he’s always going to be forced to acquiesce to the more pro-business agenda of Peter Mandelson, as cabinet did over the third runway at Heathrow.
Postlethwaite protest over Kingsnorth
Actor Pete Postlethwaite is considering handing back his OBE if the UK government gives the go-ahead to the Kingsnorth Power coal-fired power station, linking the Kingsnorth issue to the Iraq War protests, the largest in modern UK history. “We tried to stop Tony Blair going to war in Iraq. But this time we’re not having it.â€
Age of Stupid as a model for climate activism
Armstrong filming in New Orleans, 2006On the eve of the premiere of Age of Stupid, an email from director Franny Armstrong:
Tabloid Revolution: Three million people will have choked on their cornflakes this morning when they read Pete’s column in the Sun. See attached. “We – that is humanity – have only a couple of years left to act if we are to stop catastrophic climate change causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.†In The Sun.
Pete being Pete Postlethwaite. The column is an achievement in itself in a paper that last year published a column by Kelvin MacKenzie headlined Global Warming Doesn’t Exist.
The Age of Stupid has been an exemplary campaign, from the crowd-funding strategy that raised £450,000 to meet production cost, £130,000 to meet distribution and publicity costs and a further £164,000 for political campaigns running alongside the movie, to an incredibly efficiently run grass-roots internet strategy to get the words out.