Once You Know

We may have thought of climate change as an event from a science fiction novel, but the reality is that the human race is sleepwalking into a climate change induced collapse which has to be accepted and confronted and which has already arrived. Cappellin’s gripping documentary asks how do you continue living a normal life with meaning once you know that the world is on the brink of catastrophe? And can you?

Connected to the natural world at an early age, Cappellin’s worldview is shaken while traveling aboard a giant container ship to Asia, leaving him obsessed with how to best respond personally and collectively to the planet’s existential crisis. Trapped at sea with 18,000 containers, his mind spins as he calculates the millions of goods and billions of economic transactions that will take place across the planet just from this one vessel, a cornerstone of the global growth machine responsible for altering the world’s climate. Panic attacks take hold of him, and visions of apocalypse flash before his eyes.

This visceral experience becomes a turning point in Cappellin’s life as he ponders how climate and energy scientists manage to face similar visions on a daily basis. His quest takes him around the world to meet four of the world’s leading climate scientists and energy experts who have coined a new field of study: “collapsology”. They share with him the truth, chaos, and hope in their work and allow him to challenge everything he took for granted — from growth-based democracies to personal freedoms. The climate scientists we meet in the film are Jean-Marc Jancovici, energy and climate expert, Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post-Carbon Institute, Saleemul Huq, IPCC adaptation expert and climate negotiation advisor, and Susanne Moser, IPCC climate resilience and communication expert.

This odyssey brings him back to himself and to Saillans, a small alpine mountain village he calls home. Here, in this life-size, open sky laboratory, everything becomes once again possible: having a child, redefining questions of social justice, implementing participatory democracy, and starting an energy transition – all the first steps perhaps, towards some kind of collective resilience. Once You Know offers a unique perspective, both personal and universal, that re-contextualizes the climate problem as not something approaching, but something already here, and charts out how we can best live in this new paradigm while attempting to mitigate its worst effects. This is an extraordinary and necessary film, sure to initiate thought and discussion.