the film produced by Marion Cotillard on the dying planet – Corriere.it

It is not rhetoric, but vital urgency. Survival instinct, necessary foresight. The world needs new, cleaner, more breathable air. Of new spaces, wider, without toxic waste and urban opprobrium. Psychologically freed from the waste of those who think only of personal opportunity and have their eyes closed on the near future. The documentary film Bigger Than Us: A world together by Flore Vasseur, in Italian cinemas on 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26 April on the occasion of World Earth Day with I Wonder Pictures, is the umpteenth cry of alarm on environmental decline, the denial of rights and the need to straighten the course. The documentary, produced by the diva Marion Cotillard with Denis Carot and Flore Vasseur, born in 1973 whose doc is remembered Meeting Snowden (2017), was presented at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival in the official competition. Consider it as a roundabout through the stories and passion of six activists joined and interviewed by Melati Wijsen, an 18-year-old Indonesian who, by mobilizing thousands of children and tourists, obtained a decree banning the sale and distribution of plastic bags, packaging and straws on the ‘island. Yours, starting from Jakarta, is a grand tour in global disaster.

With the model Greta Thunberg in the foreground, Melati’s interlocutors I am: 1) Mohamad al Jounde, Lebanese, who fled the war in Syria, who built a school attended by 200 refugee children; 2) Memory Banda, a baby pasionaria from Malawi, who blocked the practice of institutionalized rape created by patriarchal society in her country: lwhere girls and adolescents are segregated with the consent of their families in a school to become good wives, basically a horrendous market for male initiation; 3) rapper Xiutezcatl Martinez, a Native American standard-bearer, who from the Colorado mountains around Boulder, in the United States, carries on the fight for environmental justice; 4) Mary Finn, who has been participating in the rescue of migrants from the sea off the coasts of Greece, Turkey and Libya since she was 18; 5) Rene Silva, who at the age of 11 created a newspaper in Brazil in which to share and denounce the stories of malfeasance in the favelas; And 6)
Winnie Tushabe, founder of Yice, an organization to teach the poorest people of Uganda the basics of permaculture so they can survive crop destruction accomplished with the abuse of pesticides.

The goal, the common intent of the seven is the (rapid) restructuring of the planet. Flore Vasseur’s camera flies from the disenchanted but hopeful gazes of the activists to the places of devastation with an intelligent (and sharp) use of drones. environmental issues, from rising sea levels to crazy drilling to global warmingare accompanied by even painful reflections on human nature, dragged down by indifference, opportunism, rapacity of behavior. The appeal to civic, ecological, moral sense, to individual responsibility are the grammatical elements of a message which, sequence after sequence, becomes like a lump in the throat. Consciousness boils over following the cahier de doléance by Flore Vasseur. Which lists and explores the problems, indicates the ballast to be eliminated and the walls to be demolished. Through a bitter description that now frightens now induces to multiply forces to change the course of events.

BIGGER THAN US: A WORLD TOGETHER by Flore Vasseur

(documentary, France, 2021, duration 85′) with Melati Wijsen
Rating: *** ½ out of 5

In Italian cinemas on 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26 April, on the occasion of World Earth Day