The Age of Stupid
| The Age of Stupid | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Franny Armstrong |
| Produced by | Lizzie Gillett |
| Written by | Franny Armstrong |
| Starring | Pete Postlethwaite Jehangir Wadia Layefa Malin Al Duvernay Fernand Pareau Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud Piers Guy Mark Lynas Mohamed Nasheed David King George Monbiot Richard Heinberg Ed Miliband Jehangir Wadia |
| Narrated by | Pete Postlethwaite |
| Music by | Chris Brierley |
| Cinematography | Franny Armstrong |
| Edited by | David G Hill |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Dogwoof Pictures (UK) |
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Release date
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Running time
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89 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | £450,000 |
The Age of Stupid is a 2009 British documentary film by Franny Armstrong, director of McLibel (1997) and Drowned Out (2002), and founder of 10:10, and first-time producer Lizzie Gillett. The executive producer is John Battsek, producer of One Day in September (1999).
The film is a drama-documentary-animation hybrid which stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, watching archival footage from the mid-to-late 2000s and asking, "Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?"
The makers of The Age of Stupid were among the first to use the crowdfunding model and pioneered a new distribution system, Indie Screenings, which allows anyone, anywhere, to hold a screening of the film and keep the profits for themselves.
The film begins in the year 2055, in a world ravaged by catastrophic climate change; London is flooded, Sydney is burning, Las Vegas has been swallowed up by desert, the Amazon rainforest has burnt up, snow has vanished from the Alps, and nuclear war has laid waste to India. An unnamed archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) is entrusted with the safekeeping of humanity's surviving store of art and knowledge. Alone in his vast repository off the coast of the largely ice-free Arctic, he reviews archival footage from back "when we could have saved ourselves", trying to discern where it all went wrong.
Amid news reports of the gathering effects of climate change and global civilization teetering towards destruction, he alights on six stories of individuals whose lives in the early years of the 21st century seem to illustrate aspects of the impending catastrophe. These six stories take the form of interweaving documentary segments that report on the lives of real people around the year 2008 and switch the film's narrative form from fiction to fact. In addition to the framing narrative in 2055, the news clips and the documentary footage of the six personal stories, the films includes animated segments and brief interviews with Mark Lynas and George Monbiot, created for the film.
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