Episode 6: Negotiating the green space between apathy and spirituality with Filmmaker Ed Sayers

Ed, you should be so proud for so many reasons.

It's the most beautiful process to making a film I've ever heard.

And it's an extremely hopeful message to give to anyone listening and to audiences who go and see the film is there are people out there who care about the world intensely and are living with it intensely.

And that process of letting those people speak and giving those people a platform is so beautiful.

And it's how scientists can truly understand, as a different example, truly understand science.

what solutions we need.

You can't create a solution that's going to work if you're sitting in an office.

You need to be talking to the people on the beach, in the rainforest, up the mountain and ask them, what is this like to live here? What is this really like to live amongst this? for a long time.

And they're the ones that need to be feeding the truth and therefore the solutions.

Not the experts who have studied it, who are extremely knowledgeable and extremely helpful, but don't understand it in that visceral way, which I think your film establishes extremely beautifully.

And it also holds the element of local and global issues.

together really well.

You're diving into different places around the world and you're going right to the heart of it, right to the individual, right to the species.

And that is part of the solution.

We need to have local solutions because that then in turn creates global change.

And that's part of the difficulty, which will come on later in this pod to talk about is the globalization of solutions and how politics global geopolitics gets in the way of that and how it's it's a money game it's what's financially beneficial to an economy as opposed to what's working for the locals and how do we fund that and not just fund that let them lead that you know they're the experts they're the ones that need to be managing this um and i think your film holds that really really well And it's a very tricky thing to do as well.

Like you say, you didn't know these people.

You didn't go to these places.

You just trusted that they were able to share their story in a way that would fit the story that you didn't know you wanted to tell, maybe.

Well, I think in a way, a bit of it was down to us to have to fit the story around what they were telling us.

So let that become the story.

Absolutely.

And again, that's why you couldn't really have scripted it and you couldn't have too much of a definite idea of what each one was going to be you just had to have a hunch that it felt good and that they were doing it for the right reasons and they had enough of an understanding of what we were trying to do and I didn't want to tell each filmmaker too much about what other people were doing we did have some examples we had a short edit that had sort of three of us doing this to as a proof of concept both for funding and also for for future contributors additional contributors but it was really important they went and started doing blueprints of each other so they all felt fresh and different and personal yeah god when you were talking then you just sort of you set off so many thoughts in my brain and A lot of them were about subsets of people I was thinking about, because one thing you said was, you know, you trusted all these people and you've given them a voice.

I would like to just a caveat on that would be that some of them are already, you know, incredibly adept environmental storytellers that we were lucky to have wanting to join in with us.

But then we were able to put a Super 8 camera in their hands, usually for the first time.