Colossal Wreck

We’ve all heard of the COP climate conferences. Whether we’ve been or not, we all have fantasies and feelings about it. Can the most powerful people in the world get together and save us, in this last-chance saloon? Or is it just a circus of corruption and greenwashing? Could anything matter less than the toothless agreements that emerge each year, leaving us in the ruin we’re in after 30 years of COPs? Or if they’d never taken place… might things already be far worse? Does it matter who’s there, and can the voices of the dispossessed ever really be heard? Does proximity to power give us hope of adjusting things for the better, or is the exclusion of the Global South somehow baked into the proceedings of ‘green capitalism’?

When my last feature film, MY EXTINCTION, was invited to COP28, these questions felt urgent to me. So I took a tiny hidden camera with me, determined to essay what I found, including my own sense of profound alienation.

That is, what’s it really like, on the ground, to go to COP? And not just any COP but the biggest, most slickly produced ever, the first hosted by a petro-state. Who shows up for this, why, how do they self-present, to what gain? What’s the tone of discourse behind the scenes? What does it actually feel like: the mixture of fear, ambition, guilt, heartbreak and ambivalence one might well feel if one ended up participating in what might well be The Meeting At The End of Time, about to become post-human? Is there something inherently polluting, not just carbon-wise but in terms of the soul, about building a megacity in the desert and then flying in 70,000 people for a climate conference, or is this sort of thing the price we have to pay to parlay with power?

I also wanted to look at the role of culture workers like us, including film and other arts. To be reflexive about our position here. Can performance, words, art really change minds? Are those in the culture space just having a jolly, furthering ego ambitions while draping themselves over the tragedy of indigenes, as it might seem to some critics? Or if you’re helping curate the presence, in film or in person, of those on the frontline of brutal environmental devastation, might that be a critical way to change hearts and minds, by bringing that tech bro or policymaker back to the heart-piercing realities of why they supposedly came here in the first place? If no-one creates a chance to stand in front of the rich and powerful and bring some language outside that of power and money, will things be even worse?

The film doesn’t find a single answer, instead ruminating from the point of view of an uncertain traveller. Presenting us with the material to make up our own minds: the faces, places, performances and voices from across the globe.

The film also includes the register of speculation and imagination. We need leaps of the imagination to enliven our present pathways and get us to think differently. The narrative becomes speculative or fictive at times, flirting with generative AI and our own post-humanity, of which Dubai’s unreal, simulated quality might be one of our most vanguard phenomena to date.