Award-winning director Damon Gameau embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us.
Drawing on the best minds from around the world to focus on climate, economics, technology, civil society, agriculture and sustainability, 2040 maps out a pathway for change that can lead us to a more ecologically sustainable and equitable future. Structured as a visual letter to his four-year old daughter, Gameau blends traditional documentary with dramatised sequences and high-end visual effects to create a vision board of how these solutions could regenerate the world for future generations.
Motivated by his daughter’s future and concern for the planet she will inherit, Gameau embarks on a global journey to meet innovators and change makers pioneering the best solutions already available to us today to improve the health of our planet and societies. Inspired by these discoveries and guided by the many children he consults with along the way, he interweaves dramatic sequences and high-end visual effects to conjure a positive portrait of what ‘could be’ instead of the current dystopian future we are so often presented with.
Aimed at a broad audience that includes children and their parents, serious information is delivered with irreverence and humour. Experts are shrunk into scenes to emphasise a point, animation makes the invisible visible and visual effects show how scaling these solutions by 2040 will positively impact our lives and our planet. This rich visual approach combined with the structure of an intimate letter to a daughter from her father allows for lightness and cheekiness, ensuring the film is both entertaining and educational, with the end goal being to inspire action and change. Many academics believe that people become inactive or paralysed on this topic because it becomes too overwhelming and alarming. 2040 is an aspirational film full of hope about the possibility to make changes that could shift the course for humanity and the planet.
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