Age of Stupid, solar powered film premiere

The Age of Stupid had its very unusual premiere on Sunday in Leicester Square.

The film, comparable to Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, was shown in a solar powered tent in the square with a green carpet, not a red one.

The star and narrator, Pete Postlethwaite of The Usual Suspects fame, arrived by solar car, others on bikes.

The event was transmitted to cinemas nationwide and the Eden Project in Cornwall, and will be available on the internet.

Planners are aiming for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records hoping for 16,000 viewers.

Pete Postlethwaite is cast as an old man living in 2055 in an Arctic with no ice.

He is viewing films from an archive of 2008, wondering why the human race did not save itself from destruction by rising temperatures when it could have.

He finds archive clips from six real-life stories, amongst them an 8-year-old refugee from Iraq with no choice but to live on the streets of Jordan, her home and family eliminated in the invasion led by the U.S, and an 82-year-old French Alpine guide who watches the glaciers he loved thaw out.

Franny Armstrong, the director, says the film is crusading as well as entertaining. Mankind has a maximum of two years in which to act to avoid a disastrous change in the climate and prevent hundreds of millions of people from dying.

A filmmaker has only one choice of subject now she believes Armstrong, who is British and 37 years old, turned to making films about the environment when her film McLibel encountered legal action, which prevented cinemas from showing it.

It was motivated by a case for libel in 1990 against McDonald’s brought by two environmental campaigners.

McLibel was seen by 25 million people because, Armstrong said, she owned the rights and she donated it to minor cable channels so millions of people were able to see it.

Funds for the new film were found by selling shares to groups or individuals; Armstrong calls it crowd funding. The whole £450,000 needed was raised this way from 228 investors in varying amounts from £500 to £35,000, entitled to a share of the profits

The most important thing is to own the rights, so that we can have power over the distribution to the largest number of people. We must also have total editorial authority, she said.