My Extinction (2023)

MY EXTINCTION (2023) Evaluation and cuttings

Campaign by tpr media consultants +44 (0)7974 428858 | sophie@tpr-media.com www.tpr-media.com 1

My Extinction 2023 “What it does is talk about climate activism in a way which is enfolded in a fictional construction of someone who is completely self­obsessed and interested in their own life, but through that, we get drawn in” Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, Kermode and Mayo’s Take

''Reminds us working together is empowering'' Susie Orbach, The Observer

"Jaunty, funny film­making" Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“If you feel you should be doing more to limit climate change but never seem to get round to it, this British documentary might speak to you” Ed Porter, Sunday Times

“… confronts the imperfect nature of being a climate activist” Henry Bird, Times Environment Newsletter

“... a call to arms for anyone worried about our burning world” Total Film, Kate Stables

“My Extinction is an excellent look into the step­by­step process of realising and understanding climate change and its impact on everyday people” Mae Trumata, The Upcoming

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My Extinction 2023 PR Overview tpr media were thrilled to be working with the award­winning filmmaker Josh Appignanesi on his latest documentary MY EXTINCTION – the third in an autobiographical trilogy following The New Man and Husband, distributed by Dartmouth Films.

MY EXTINCTION is a warm, funny portrait of a self­interested, ineffectual dad who starts to panic about environmental breakdown and ends up getting far more involved in climate action than he’d ever thought possible, culminating in action that brings in Zadie Smith, Mark Rylance, Juliet Stevenson, Simon Schama, and many other leading voices. Appignanesi turns the camera on himself, torn between supporting his family or preserving the planet for his children: “I just don't want them to hate me as we all drown.”

We began working in May 2023 prior to the film’s release and premiere at the Curzon Mayfair on June 29, carrying out a national campaign with over 40 pieces of coverage between June and July across national and regional press, radio and film publications. The sum of opportunities to see (OTS) was 29.7m and the advertising value equivalent (AVE) was £844k (please note these figures exclude broadcast). Radio and podcast highlights include interviews on BBC Radio London (Robert Elms, Listed Londoner), Times Radio (Hugo Rifkind; Ruth Davidson), and podcasts including Steve Richard’s Rock and Roll Politics and the Byline Times podcast (Adrian Goldberg) with Peter Pomerantsev, who features in the film. MY EXTINCTION was also mentioned again on Times Radio (Mariella Frostrup) by Larushka Ivan­Zadeh, Chief Film Critic at Metro and Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s podcast Kermode and Mayo’s Take did a bonus review for Apple Podcasts.

Highlights of national coverage from the campaign included authored pieces by Josh Appignanesi in Observer Magazine, The Mirror and The Big Issue, and Jewish national coverage including The Jewish Chronicle, a Q&A in The Jewish Telegraph, and an interview in Jewish News. There was an op­ed on climate anxiety by author Susie Orbach in the Observer, who features in the film, as well as a mention in a feature

by Hugo Rifkind about climate guilt in The Times. Reviews of MY EXTINCTION were positive, appearing in The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw), The Sunday Times (Ed Porter), The Times Environment Newsletter (Henry Bird) and the Morning Star (Maria Duarte). Highlights of reviews in film publications include Total Film, Screen Daily and Vague Visages.

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Analytics

Sum of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE):

£844k

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Sum of Opportunity to See (OTS):

29.7m

tpr media consultants – June 2023

Radio and Podcast National Radio Josh Appignanesi was interviewed on Times Radio (with a reach of 500K) for the Hugo Rifkind show.

Hugo later mentioned the film again in a Times feature about climate guilt.

Josh Appignanesi was interviewed on BBC Radio London for Robert Elms’ ‘Listed Londoner’ slot, where every Sunday a notable Londoner answers famous 15 questions to become a Listed Londoner.

The documentary was discussed extensively.

Larushka Ivan Zadeh (Chief Film Critic at Metro) mentioned the documentary on the film slot on the Mariella Frostrup show on Times Radio.

Josh Appignanesi discussed the film and influencing social change in an 18­minute interview with Ruth Davidson on Times Radio.

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Podcasts

The film had a bonus review on Kermode and Mayo’s Take, a podcast (formerly on BBC Radio 5) consisting of film and TV reviews. Kermode and Mayo said the film “talks about climate activism in a way which is enfolded in a fictional construction of someone who is completely self­obsessed and interested in their own life, but through that, we get drawn in.”

Josh Appignanesi was interviewed by broadcaster and author Steve Richards for an episode on his podcast Rock N Roll Politics, which takes a twice­ weekly look behind the scenes of UK politics and the media that shapes the way we view epic political dramas.

Josh Appignanesi was interviewed by award­ winning radio presenter Adrian Goldberg for an episode of the Byline Times podcast. Byline Times is an independent news platform that reports on ‘what the papers don’t say’.

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National Features

Self & Wellbeing feature by Josh Appignanesi ­ including a mention of the film both and a link to buy tickets

Self & wellbeing Photograph KATE PETERS

own ego? Maybe there’s while there surely are ge was never going to be m One thing I’ve found retain your egotism. You As you can tell, I’m mos But nor am I an especia petrol in my car, but I do of production. Halfway moment came when I w for an oil company. You how that conflict went.

Waking up a bit to my ultimately down to Gret was down to my sense o began when a longstand apart and I was thrown

I was in denial about climate action – until I realised that you might just have to despair to care…

Words JOSH APPIGNANESI Have you ever felt, “Climate breakdown, argh, oh shite”? And then felt, “But what am I supposed to do about it?” And then spent an hour listlessly researching electric cars, before getting overwhelmed by the whole extinction-level endeavour and doing sweet FA? My new film, My Extinction, charts my transformation from self-absorbed, guilty, inactive dad to self-absorbed, guilty, slightly less inactive dad. That is, it shows how a journey from total inaction to climate action turned out not to be as radically transformative as I might have supposed. And I mean that in a positive sense.

Before I became “slightly less inactive”, my idea of transformational change involved epiphanies and wholesale conversions. “I was blind but now I see” – that kind of thing. And I especially assumed this was true of climate warriors, whose task – halting the apocalypse, basically – seemed to me to be so impossibly large that I couldn’t even bring myself to think too much about it, let alone add it to my daily to-do list: take kids to school, buy almond milk, save the planet.

I think I must have felt that to really let that knowledge in – emotionally and not just in some passing intellectual way – might doom me to a lifetime tunnelling under petrol depots and chaining myself to oil rigs. Surely real commitment to such a global task would be all or nothing.

In which case, well, it was going to have to be nothing.

Tied to this basic disengagement, all my other forms of denial worked furiously to defend me: “Is it really so much hotter?”; “I prefer the heat anyway”; “Tech will solve it”; “The government will solve it”; “I recycle”; “I buy almond milk”; “I’m busy!” And the easiest of cynicisms: “It won’t achieve much anyway.” (Spoiler: protest movements do achieve much, as history copiously proves.) Besides, like most of humanity, ensuring planetary survival struck me as palpably less immediate than ensuring my own.

But then, I was moved. It came in bits. One of these was watching Greta Thunberg – a mere child! – address the United Nations. When she told world leaders that “I want you to act as if the house is on fire,” I really felt it. Guiltily, as a dad. I’d now find myself looking at my two children in all their heartbreaking innocence and ignorance – not yet knowing that the world I was handing over was already being shorn of so many of the comforts and securities I’d enjoyed in my own childhood. So yes, Greta – a child who knew more about what was actually happening than the adults did – got to me. Yet when I then decided to visit the XR protests with my camera, I still assumed that, if I was to join up properly, I’d have to go on strike against the rest of my working life – which a child can do, I figured, but a parent surely can’t.

But I soon discovered that instigating change doesn’t have to leave you glued to the M25 or placed on one of the Home Office’s ever-expanding terror lists. And what

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Most days I still do sweet FA to make change happen

I also discovered, as I followed my guilt into hanging out with actual, bona fide activists, was that even those who do go that extra mile completely fail the zealot test. Not one of the people I met had gone all Joan of Arc. They were all still themselves: teachers, baristas, architects, management consultants, bakers, students, grandmas – except that they sacrificed one night of Netflix a week to meeting people with similar concerns. And then, with lots of debate about strategy, tactics, ethics, they’d – we’d – try to do something. We campaigned the local council about cycle lanes. We protested outside Defra. We talked nicely to annoying family members. Much of this worked.

And – ineptly, with plenty of cynicism to shed – as I got my hands a little dirty, I discovered I felt a bit better. Yes, I had to open myself up to those disavowed feelings of despair and paralysis.

But you know what?

I could take it. And in so doing, I started to feel less stymied, less lonely,

I introduced one of my children to the joys of collective action

more effective. Even as a parent. As the psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose told me, children have a way of finding out what it is the grownups don’t want them to know, whether about sex, or death, or the climate crisis. So the other thing getting involved in activism afforded me was the chance to speak more openly with my children about the world I’d brought them into. They were very young at the time, but by speaking with the broadest of brushstrokes, I was actually a much easier-going parent when I stopped pretending that all was well with that world. And I could temper that bad news with news about our ability to change things for the better.

I even introduced one of my kids to the joys of collective action, speaking to other families as they left the Science Museum. About how their terrific exhibitions are funded by fossil fuel giants greenwashing themselves.

My child got to find out how some people are really curious to hear things they didn’t know, and others really, really aren’t. Then we talked about why that might be.

Of course, I was also doing all this to assuage my guilt – to be able to turn around to them in 10 years and say: “Sorry about your world, but hey, at least I tried, and here’s the filmed evidence!” Was trying to mitigate climate disaster something I did chiefly to service my 02.07.23 The Observer Magazine

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of rage, impotence and perceived as leading to t rather than, well, extinc pool of feelings, felt in a failed, that opened the d sharing rather than den on them. It hit me at a p shared acutely and pain despair at a world that w global population. Hear discovering that these s to connect us to commu positive rather than des I realised that you mi Admit that and you can furies into something m you need the help of oth I found that there real will matter. And nobody to find my own method you to sacrifice yourself you’re already good at, j help from others to mak you can do something p you’re in a corporate po to divest from carbon fu factory floor, well, it mig of smashing the robots keep making films, albe Most days I still do sw of anxiety and irritation that I now have somewh feelings. There was no m especially radical has to to occur. The climate ha and so, it turns out, do I the climate, you’ll still b enjoy it more. ■

My Extinction is now sho nationwide (dartmouthfi

The Observer Magazine 0

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PETERS own ego? Maybe there’s something to that idea. Because while there surely are genuine altruists out there, that was never going to be me, a monster of self-absorption.

One thing I’ve found out through all this: you get to retain your egotism. You don’t even have to be “worthy”.

As you can tell, I’m most certainly not the messiah.

But nor am I an especially naughty boy. I drive, I use petrol in my car, but I don’t (currently) own its means of production. Halfway through this process, a crunch moment came when I was offered a much-needed gig – for an oil company. You’ll have to watch the film to see how that conflict went.

Waking up a bit to my own citizenship wasn’t ultimately down to Greta, or Attenborough, or XR. It was down to my sense of personal failure. This film began when a longstanding movie project of mine fell apart and I was thrown into a furious entitlementfuelled pity party, as in: “What’s the point of killing myself trying to do all this stupid crap anyway, given the world is ending?”

A defensive thought at first, for sure. But then, when shared, it became something I started hearing literally. What are we killing ourselves for?

I was in a – some might say typically male – state of rage, impotence and reaction at a system that I chiefly perceived as leading to the extinction of my career, rather than, well, extinction. But it’s precisely this toxic pool of feelings, felt in a culture that makes us all feel failed, that opened the door to change. The key was sharing rather than denying, repressing or acting out on them. It hit me at a protest-training group. A woman shared acutely and painfully her impotence, rage and despair at a world that was on course to starve half the global population. Hearing her words made me cry. I was discovering that these same emotions had the capacity to connect us to communities of feeling that take positive rather than destructive action.

I realised that you might just have to despair to care.

Admit that and you can recycle those depressions and furies into something more usefully directed, though you need the help of others. To discuss solutions.

I found that there really are things you can do, and they will matter. And nobody got on my case. I was welcome to find my own method, my own speed. Nobody’s asking you to sacrifice yourself either. Instead, you find things you’re already good at, just with a climate-y rewrite, with help from others to make it happen. If you’re a lawyer, you can do something pro bono for a climate charity. If you’re in a corporate position, you can get your company to divest from carbon funds. If you work on the Amazon factory floor, well, it might need to be more on the scale of smashing the robots and rising up with weaponry. I’ll keep making films, albeit more climate-concerned ones.

Most days I still do sweet FA about anything. The buzz of anxiety and irritation and guilt remains. It’s just that I now have somewhere I can go to recycle those feelings. There was no major conversion. Nothing especially radical has to happen for radical change to occur. The climate has its many tipping points, and so, it turns out, do I. If you do take action on the climate, you’ll still be you. You might even enjoy it more. ■

Most days I still do sweet FA to make change happen

analyst f finding know, s. So the d me hildren re very adest of g parent h that ews . f hey left hibitions emselves. ally hers really, ht be. my ears and tried, mitigate ce my

My Extinction is now showing in cinemas nationwide (dartmouthfilms.com/myextinction)

r Magazine

The Observer Magazine 02.07.23

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Séamas O’Reilly When it comes to survival, choosing peas or carrots can be crucial… Just ask Bear Grylls  @shockproofbeats

I’m not really in the habit of recommending ‘parenting hacks’, but one I’ve always liked is presenting commands as choices. If, for example, I ask my son if he wants veg with dinner, he’ll offer a comprehensive no. But, if I ask whether he’d prefer peas or carrots, he’ll pick one. That he usually refuses to eat whatever he’s picked is, of course, regrettable.

I do now have an unlikely ally in this fight, and his name is Bear Grylls. My son’s new favourite show is You vs Wild, an interactive series in which you pilot Bear Grylls through survival situations like a painseeking voodoo doll. I laugh smugly as my son tells me, sleepily, after three backto-back episodes, that the best way to struggle out of a sinking bog is to move as little as possible. ‘I don’t think that’ll come up any time soon,’ I chuckle, before an inward glance reminds me that I spend the entirety of our watches attempting to memorise these

self-same strategies.

I’m reasonably confident the show’s fanbase contains as many men my age as it does children under 10.

I reckon kids love Bear because he affirms their own sense of invincibility, a confidence that, given the opportunity, they probably could parachute into the jungle and build an entirely new airplane from the trees, rocks and animal droppings.

My theory is that he appeals to men approaching middle age for precisely the opposite reason: we are disconcertingly aware of our own mortal uselessness, and his promise to help us cheat death – even from threats abstracted to the point of absurdity – provides a welcome palliative. To put it another way, believing you’d withstand a bear attack when you’re five feels cool; to do so when you routinely get dizzy if you stand up too quick, is near euphoric.

At each big decision, Bear gives you the pros and cons, before asking you to pick up your remote and choose whether he should,

for example, eat berries or moss, make camp or hunt for food, or eat animal faeces or not. ‘It’s your choice,’ he says, before adding with a gravitas known only to those who recreationally drink wolf piss, ‘You decide!’

It is an impeccable televisual format. More importantly, his signature catchphrase is one I can now use to get my son to do anything. ‘Peaaaas,’ I say, exaggerating the vowel sounds in an impression of Bear. ‘They’re small but they pack a lot of taste and energy, or caaaarrots – they’re bigger, come in funkier colours and help you see in the dark. It’s your choice, you decide!’

To my astonishment, he doesn’t just pick the peas or carrots, but eats them.

I use the same tactics for choosing books before bedtime, and getting his socks on before school.

I rejoice, having conquered a frontier of parenting every bit as challenging as a wolf-populated tundra.

Now, if I could just stand up without getting dizzy, I’d be unstoppable.

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Op­ed on climate anxiety by Susie Orbach (in print and online) including a mention of the film both and a link to buy tickets pp

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle The Observer

We don’t have to be overwhelmed by climate anxiety. Feel the pain, then act Susie Orbach

We might be scared and not know what to do. But as a new film reveals, that can help Sun 25 Jun 2023 08.02 BST

t doesn’t matter which week we choose. There is always a climate emergency; an emergency we can close our ears and eyes to. Two weeks ago, it was the blanketing

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of New York in a cloud of smoke from Canada. Last week, Beijing recorded the hottest June since records began. All over the world, sea levels rise. Drought or flooding ensues. And the loss of habitats and species. We can get frightened and find it hard to hold the knowledge of what is occurring.

As filmmaker Josh Appignanesi shows in his new film My Extinction, which will be

released on 30 June, allowing himself to feel the real-time effects of climate change is uncomfortable. Appignanesi, who recycles yet makes car commercials, turns the camera on himself as his climate concerns start to make him feel disgruntled. He feels put out and inconvenienced. And he ends up getting far more involved in climate work than he’d ever thought possible.

The implications of acknowledging the nefarious activities of the oil and logging companies, and the London hard-sell thinktanks that operate as fig leaves for their corporate power, can be enraging and curiously stultifying. Yet if we stay long enough with our feelings of rage, of helplessness, of sorrow, of wanting to shut off what we didn’t want to know about, we can find a way too towards a new ethics of responsibility.

Appignanesi’s film reminds us that working together is the empowering antidote. It’s a lesson we need to be reminded of again and again.

My working day as a psychotherapist involves engaging with conflicts, with confusions, with lassitude. Clarity and relief don’t come from intricate analysis on its own. Clarity and relief emerge out of an understanding of the difficult feelings generated by hurt, by abandonment, by aggression, by neglect, by carelessness and by unintentionality.

Along with understanding is the process of experiencing these often troubling emotions. Experiencing emotions is not an “aha” moment. Feelings are more devilish and complex. It’s as though we have to “un-repress” them so they can unfold through their many and varied dimensions.

The involuntary turning away and acceptance that our world is doomed can sink us into despair

We might first notice rage, which then gives way to sadness, to despair and a new thoughtfulness about what to do. Or we might start with helplessness, which opens up into insult and then indignation. How feelings cascade is personal. They are rooted in the emotional palates we were exposed to growing up – the feelings our

families sanctioned (and didn’t) and how we’ve been able to expand from those. In whichever way we now come at our feelings, what’s interesting is that, once allowed, supplementary feelings emerge.

Sticking around to see what those are enriches not just our own sense of self and potency but builds a bridge to doing. Adding our knowledge – the facts of a given situation – to our feelings combines to create new psychological landscapes that allow an individual, family or group to act differently in the present.

So, too, with climate issues and the sorrows and immobility that the catastrophic can at first induce in us. The involuntary turning away and acceptance that our world is doomed can sink us into despair. Thank goodness for the young and their refusal of futility. Their railing and actions set an example by reminding us that acknowledging our feelings can propel us to act. Shutting off from our feelings is a counsel of collapse; it diminishes us, it disempowers us, it makes us less smart and, in so doing, adds to the climate emergency.

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Do we know what to do? Not exactly. Are the efforts being made by individuals who come together to force the climate emergency on to our and the government’s consciousness effective? Yes and no. Awareness is high, but action is interrupted by ideological currents that seep into us emotionally.

Climate deniers learned new tricks from their forefathers in the tobacco lobby to stain our minds. Tobacco companies no longer deny smoking is bad – that battle is lost. Instead, they instigate an emotional appeal about freedom, individual choice and desire.

And so, too, the climate deniers having lost the scientific fight, have chosen to fight on a different terrain. They also invoke individual choice, reformulating progress as personal freedom. It’s sold as part of growth – economic development brings the whole world wealth. It’s a strange sell, and yet a compelling one. It’s of a piece with bearing arms in the United States and everyone making their own destiny and wealth, being an individual who can think for her or himself.

Psychology is harnessed to a pseudo-behavioural economics to persuade us that personal liberty and growth is all, that the freedom to travel where we wish, to see the world as our playground, to see forest fires and coral death as part of the “natural” ecosystem are phenomena we shouldn’t worry too much about so long as we recycle.

Emotional appeal at this level isn’t just cynical; it is deadly. It needs to be resisted.

The young, growing up more emotionally literate and with greater knowledge about environmental stories, are the ones to take the lead and contest such abhorrent views of freedom and personal liberty as they work to find solutions to the climate crisis. They join those who love and respect the “natural” world and those of us who abhor the perverse agendas of growth that rape the earth.

Yes, it is true we don’t know what to do but we are endeavouring to learn together, fight and speak truth to power. Old slogans, I know, but no less valid for that.

Feelings can make us humble and make us strong. There isn’t a contradiction, just different aspects of human subjectivity that can propel us to think and act.

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and social critic. She is the author of many books including Bodies and Fat is a Feminist Issue My Extinction by Josh Appignanesi will be showing in cinemas nationwide from 30 June. The premiere will take place on 29 June. Tickets available here Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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Online op­ed on what to tell your children about Climate Change feature by Josh Appignanesi

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Mention of the documentary in an op­ed by Hugo Rifkind about climate guilt

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Feature by Josh Appignanesi about climate activism

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Authored piece by Josh Appignanesi

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Jewish Telegraph ­ 20 questions Q&A with Josh Appignanesi (print)

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Sarah Miller interview with Josh Appignanesi JN LIFE

All Change Sarah Miller meets filmmaker Josh Appignanesi ahead of the launch of his autobiographical documentary on climate action

F

or climate activists, 2019 will be remembered as a standout year. While wildfires were ravaging Australia, Sir David Attenborough was making a shock appearance at Glastonbury to talk about plastic pollution.

Meanwhile, climate prodigy Greta Thunberg, just 16, went to a UN climate conference in New York and scolded world leaders for inaction, telling them: “You are failing us.” And across the UK, a fledgling group known as Extinction Rebellion was beginning to galvanise.

It was also in these heady preCovid days that filmmaker Josh Appignanesi found himself in a career lull. With far too much time on his hands – he began contemplating not only about his own existence, but also that of life itself.

What kind of world were his two young sons growing up in and why had he neglected doing more to think about that?

Out of this anxiety sprang the idea for a wry, autobiographical documentary that follows Josh on his path from hapless Jewish father of two and self-described “waste man” from London fumbling his way through life to a political activist making speeches alongside Zadie Smith, Simon Schama, Juliet Stevenson and other leading voices on climate action.

The resulting work, My Extinction, is being released in cinemas nationwide this week.

Josh, 48, is no stranger to having his life play out on the big screen: his latest film is the final part of an autobiographical trilogy featuring his wife, the writer and academic Devorah Baum. His 2016 documentary The New Man follows the couple as they embark on parenthood for the first time,

Josh Appignanesi with a fellow protester in a scene from the film

and Husband, released last year, is a searingly honest look at modern marriage as Josh accompanies his wife on her book tour.

The writer and director – best known for Song of Songs and The Infidel – describes his latest film as “the same shtick, where I play a slightly amplified comic version of myself, the butt of the joke, the selfinvolved entitled guy who goes on a journey. But this time round it’s much more political.”

The journey Josh refers to is one that sees him at the start making adverts for car companies, perhaps even – though it makes him flinch to think of it now – taking the odd gig from an oil company. His biggest crises are centred on himself and the minutiae of his own life. We even see him getting angry at ‘those’ people, the protesters who cause traffic to come to a grinding halt. But then everything changes.

Josh told Jewish News: “I had some career things that I thought were going to work out, but they didn’t. And then you’re left sort of wringing your hands, thinking I’m forty-something, I should have made it by now, I should have had these Family life: Josh with one of his two sons

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successes and I’ve got all these ego demands. Then you begin to think about the world in general and realise really bad things are happening and you have children.

In that moment of failure I asked myself, why am I avoiding the elephant in the room?”

He slowly realises the state of the planet is a much bigger deal to him than he realised. But like many others in his ‘privileged’ position, Josh makes varying excuses as to why he’s not doing more to bring about change, including the notquite-so-accurate disclaimer that he’s “got a lot on at the moment”.

Josh is keen to discover what’s holding him back. A chat with his slightly crazy, anti-natalist conspiracy theorist pal Danny Shine, who believes the world would be better off if people didn’t procreate, doesn’t quite hit the mark – perhaps because Danny himself is a father of three.

But then Josh receives a glimmer of insight during a tennis rally with another friend, the writer Peter Pomerantsev. “In a way, the nutters are us,” explains Peter in a deadpan manner.

“We know the science, we admit that it’s real – and we do bugger all.”

Josh looks despondent, but his ‘awakening’ has just been given a kickstart. We see him starting to go to protests as a bemused observer, before signing himself up to attend Writers Rebel and Extinction Rebellion meetings, where participants are planning their next action.

At this point, Josh’s dedication to the cause still appears to be slightly on the fence, but then the group discuss their greatest fears.

One woman speaks emotionally about the threat of mass starvation from climate change and her words evoke an emotional reaction from the filmmaker, whose maternal family perished in the Holocaust.

“When she started talking, almost in tears, about the possibility of seeing friends, of people we know or our children, our children’s children, really suffering and going through starvation, it was very moving. We don’t like to think about these things because they’re bloody ugly, horrible and hard to think about. It’s just much easier to have functional denial.

“I don’t particularly want to think about such things as starvation and deprivation, but it’s not like this is such a distant fantasy in the future. It’s literally in my past. My mum’s side came from Poland, and apart from her mother and father who managed to escape, everyone else in our family was wiped out.”

This history, combined with a strong sense of Jewishness has, says Josh, inspired him to delve deeper into making an impact.

“My favourite line in the film is where I’m at a protest and telling my friend [and comedian] Dave Schneider that I’m just really hopeless and depressed about the whole thing – and he says: ‘Of course you’re depressed, you’re Jewish!’

Cue me looking depressed on a

lonely riverbank,” he says, wryly.

“But I do think Jewishness, that history and that tradition, is partly one of having feelings. You have to be able to say, ‘This is really, really hard’ before you can then say, ‘Well, now what? [As Hillel says] If not me, then who?’ ” For all his agonising and despondency, Josh really begins to step up into the role of climate activist, helping to organise protests and rallying the troops – though, in something of a running gag throughout the film, he nervously laughs and firmly shakes his head every time someone asks: “Are you up for being arrested?”

While happily shirking the chance to spend time behind bars by locking himself to a lamppost or similar as an act of non-violent protest, Josh plays more of a central role during the September 2020 protest outside 55 Tufton Street, the headquarters of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has been accused of promoting climate change denial.

By the film’s end, there’s a feeling Josh is not in the same place where he began. He’s now a man of action, not just words, and making commercials for oil companies is now very far off his much greener radar. Surely now he doesn’t still feel like a “waste man”?

“Of course I’m still a waste man!” he laughs. “I don’t think in this dysfunctional world of ours with these incredibly high expectations that many feel they haven’t failed in some way.

“But what I have learnt is that when it comes to climate it’s not all or nothing. Being an activist doesn’t mean having to quit my job, abandon my family and run off to the Amazon. You can spend a few hours a week or even a month helping in whatever way you can.

The point is that everyone should just do something.”  My Extinction is released in cinemas tomorrow. Josh Appignanesi will appear alongside Devorah Baum and David Baddiel for a postscreening Q&A at JW3 on Sunday 2 July at 3.30pm.

Tickets: www.jw3.org.uk

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Online Features

Feature by Josh Appignanesi

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Q&A ­ all you need to know about Oxford (34.9k followers)

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Feature interview with Josh Appignanesi

BDE interview: My Extinction by Josh Appignanesi

By Nick Cunningham - 23 June 2023

My Extinction by Josh Appignanesi

Josh Appignanesi is very good at playing that kind of feckless but loveable dilettante whose priorities (which amount to himself and his career) are placed centre stage as greater crises, whether global or domestic, play out across the planet or on the home front. It’s a role that he performed memorably in his last documentary Husband, where his wife’s literary excursion to New York becomes secondary to his decision to accompany her on it.

But of course, it’s all somewhat of a front. That is his “shtick,” as he puts it, to construct a documentary narrative around somebody who is completely self-obsessed, somebody whose opinions you’re not likely to seek out, only for him to come good at the end and nally occupy a position a little less centre-stage and vainglorious.

Funnily enough, in the case of My Extinction, the place he ends up is very much stage left, within the heart of the radical Writers Rebel and Extinction Rebellion movements.

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The premise of the documentary is simple. As for most people (although to a large extent Josh, as a successful lmmaker married to an arguably more successful writer and philosopher, is not like ‘most people’), the climate crisis is a matter for concern, but doing something about it can be a bit timeconsuming. Who wants to chain themselves to a fence or glue themselves to a pavement? And let’s face it, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of unexpected warm weather every now and then?

But one day Josh nds himself watching Greta on telly, and is moved by her. What’s more, the daily news seems to be lled with increasing numbers of environmental catastrophes – bush res in Australia, crumbling glaciers in the Antarctic, oods, droughts and refugee migrants. And Josh has small kids himself who may very well want to have kids themselves one day. While he may be (at least as presented in his docs) an ineffectual and self-absorbed dad, he is nevertheless a very loving one too.

As he says to his wife Devorah, albeit with a dose of irony and understatement, “When they’re old enough to say, ‘what the fuck did you do?’ I just want to be able to say, ‘I was there. Here’s some photographic evidence.’

I’m just sel shly thinking, I just don’t want them to hate me as we all drown.”

So Josh takes his rst faltering steps towards active protest, and joins the outspoken and surprisingly radical Writers Rebel group of climate activists. No, he will not get himself arrested under any circumstances, and yes, the dangling carrot of a ludicrously well paid petroleum gig threatens to derail his new militancy, but Josh remains on course, and proves to be an articulate and engaged soldier within what seems set to be a long battle against climate change, and those who have a vested interest in denying its existence.

Appignanesi happily admits how it was losing out on a very well paid car advertisement pre-pandemic which opened the door for his engagement with new radicalism. “Maybe if I’d been, as I say at the end of the lm, busy with big commissions on lm projects and big commercials and all the other stuff I do, then maybe I would’ve not really had time to worry about this,” he says. “But, you know, that isn’t what happened.”

Instead, amidst his feelings of career angst, failure and dread, he was offered extra time and head space to take a closer look at the world beyond him, how it was becoming increasingly endangered and how the future lives of his kids were looking potentially bleaker. “In that moment [of career disappointment]… a void opens where, if it can be admitted to, change can start to percolate.”

Which is the message that he underlines in the lm, to galvanise like-minded people who should be scared shitless by the prospect of climate change to, in some way, shift their mindset and actually do something to combat it. “I expect that most people watching this lm are all already going be switched onto climate in some way. They’re not going to be deniers…but they could be doing more basically.”

The doc shows a lot of non-violent protest on the streets, sometimes against a carnival backdrop, and at other times when the law steps in. The lm culminates in the joyous September 2020 protest outside 55 Tufton Street in London, home to the controversial Global Warming Policy Foundation, by Writers Rebel and

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featuring public declarations from the likes of journalist and activist George Monbiot, writers Zadie Smith and Simon Schama, and actors Mark Rylance and Juliet Stevenson. Some GWPF members have been accused of practising and promoting climate change denial.

Climate change is a serious business, but that doesn’t mean you can’t employ a bit of levity when making a lm about it, Appignanesi argues, as we see in his journey from incredulousness to full-on wise-cracking commitment to the cause, and all the stages in-between. A standing joke in the lm is how none of the writers are prepared to go the whole hog and get themselves arrested. They are much too busy for that. We are even presented a cameo by the megaphone-wielding anti-natalist conspiracy theorist Danny Shine, who

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thinks humans should just stop reproducing altogether. The wonderful irony is that Danny has three children himself.

But in among the laughs, there is a serious point to be addressed. “Yes, I guess with this lm, the idea was there are no climate documentaries that are funny. There are no climate documentaries I’ve seen that have intimacy beyond the usual intimacy of, here are some climate activists and we’re up close to them. We feel their feelings as they go through this hardcore climate activism. That’s great. And that needs to be there,” says the director.

“But there is the other kind of intimacy, the everyday one that people watching the lm are maybe more familiar with, which is like, ‘I have a family and I have kids.’ Or ‘I have a mum with asthma’…or all the ways in which climate is very clearly there in our lives. And those discussions [about climate] are being had, but they’re being had behind closed doors. If people could see that other people were having them more, then they’d feel more able to have them. Those were two registers that I wanted to hit.”

Appignanesi feels, furthermore, that these registers must be applied across all media, that the issue of climate change should be elevated out of the realm of the doc. “A romcom can as subtly re ect that we are in an emergency,” he says.

The lm receives its world premiere June 29 ahead of its UK release by Dartmouth Films. Appignanesi will be heavily supporting the impact strategy of bringing a “persuadable” friend, “somebody who is worried about the climate, but never does anything.”

“Bring your dad who’s doesn’t know what to do and so therefore doesn’t do anything and drives an SUV. It’s agnostic who you are, but just bring someone along. And then, if you watch this lm with someone, it will be more powerful because you’ll have that conversation,” he says.

And what of the director himself? How is his ego bearing up at the end of this intense lm process? “I’m still an egotistical, self-absorbed lmmaker with my own kind of worries and sense of failure and dread, but I think that is actually essential for change…but hopefully by the end you’ll think, well, he may actually still be that guy, but at least he’s doing something,” Appignanesi signs off.

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Mention in article about writers becoming climate activists

My Extinction, directed Josh Appignanesi, 2023

And then I learned that it was the fossil fuel companies themselves who invented that term to distract us all from the fact that they continue to turn a profit while the world burns. That they are actively funding climate denial, though they’ve long known what was going on: as early as the 1970s, ExxonMobil knew the damage they were inflicting on the environment, and they started lobbying governments to prevent anyone from actually doing anything about it. They wanted us to keep buying their gasoline, plastics and other petrochemical products and told us that as long as we were recycling all would be well. All my worrying about how much food waste we were creating, saving up to add solar panels to the roof – I was driving myself crazy and into debt trying to help matters, when the people who were really responsible, who could actually make a difference, were doing fuck all.

So there I was on the train, feeling intensely angry, frustrated, impotent and full of dread. In need of outside help to navigate the situation, I opened up my laptop and turned on Josh Appignanesi’s new film My Extinction, which had come out a few weeks before. What better way to sort through my anxieties about my conversion from climate agnosticism to climate activism than watch a film about one man’s conversion from climate agnosticism to climate activism? * Like much of Appignanesi’s recent work, My Extinction is somewhat autofictional; it stars the director himself as a freelance filmmaker whose funding on his next big feature has just fallen through. With some unexpected free time on his hands, he starts hanging around Extinction Rebellion protests, attending non-violent direct action (NVDA) training sessions, getting increasingly involved in the planning of protest actions. Late one night he watches a video of 16-year-old Thunberg telling the European Parliament to act as if the house was on fire. He tries to talk to his kids about it, but they’re more concerned about the menace of ‘Daddy monster’. He talks things through with his wife, the writer and scholar Devorah Baum, as well as with friends, from psychoanalysts to anti-natalists. In this way, My Extinction is a film about community – but it is also about the role affect and language play in creating and maintaining those bonds. It is about the limits of language to address imminent catastrophe, but also but the necessity of finding words to describe what’s happening, to tell stories that will convince and move and make a difference.

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Climate, in My Extinction, is an epistemological problem, a problem of articulation. The film includes passages where writers and activists talk about talking – what we mean when we talk about climate, and how we make people, ourselves included, understand that we really mean it. ‘If we can somehow hold onto’ those meanings, says the group leader at an NVDA training Appignanesi attends, ‘they can fuel our rebellion’.

My Extinction, directed Josh Appignanesi, 2023

My book is about art and feminist activism, the onus that’s been placed on women to tell their stories, how difficult that can be, and how impossible it is to be believed, for our words to make any concrete difference in the world. I look at artists and writers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathy Acker, Ana Mendieta, and Kara Walker, at how they put into action Virginia Woolf’s call in A Room of One’s Own to ‘break the sequence’ and ‘break the sentence’. I look at performances like Suzanne Lacy, Aviva Rahmani and Judy Chicago’s Ablutions (1972), Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975) or Sutapa Biswas’s Kali (1983–85) to see how these artists have changed not only the story of women’s bodies but the modes through which we tell stories: modes of breaking through, disrupting, inspiring meaningful action.

At the NVDA training Appignanesi attends, the group leader explains: ‘non-violent direct action is disruptive, it is resistance, and it is confrontational, it is just doing it in a peaceful way. And the core reason for this is if it’s not disruptive then nobody’s gonna care what we’re doing.’ This, essentially, is the principle driving the works I cite above and write about in my book. It is also the logic behind our organising in Edinburgh: the statement, the walkout, our promise of a future boycott.

The more I learn about the fossil fuel projects in which Baillie Gifford invests, like their funding of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the more I realize there is a direct line leading from my event about feminist art at the Baillie Gifford West Stage in Edinburgh to the homes of people in Tanzania and Uganda which will be destroyed if the pipeline goes through. The proposed pipeline will emit more than twentyfive times the combined annual emissions of Tanzania and Uganda. There may not be much I, a writer, can do about all of this. But if you find out that kind of line exists, it’s your moral obligation to share that information, to make the line visible to people who are probably not aware of it.

Of the many speeches in Appignanesi’s film that galvanized me and helped me turn up to my own climate protest, there was one that really got me where I live, as they say. It was the playwright, director and actor Simon McBurney, who pointed out that when people think about ‘writing’, they think that writers ‘are creating some kind of fiction, something which is outside of reality’. ‘It seems to me’, he says, ‘that the way that writers write is the opposite of that, they are actually able to draw back the curtain to help us see what is there’. In My Extinction, by filming himself and his friends, letting us into his home, his insecurities, his doubts and his anger, Appignanesi does exactly what McBurney is talking about: pulls back the curtain to reveal that behind the ‘fiction’ of the book or the film, is the writer, confronted with a real situation, and trying to say something about it.

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My Extinction, directed Josh Appignanesi, 2023

* In the end, I started my event by reading a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Foundation in 2014:

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right oif kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

It seemed important to challenge the way we fund our literature festivals in words, the very material that unites us. To take the thing we all love so much – literature, storytelling, critical thinking – and use it to tear away the veil, acknowledging what’s happening, while we sit in lecture theatres paid for by oil and profits from it. The festival’s response to our protest was to point out that they provide a space in which to have these conversations, to educate and inform. What so shocked me, in this first foray into climate protest, was the response to it: the way people seemed so bent on maintaining the status quo in defence of the festival they love. Respectfully, it is not the time to discuss climate change, and what ought to be done about it, but rather the time to take major steps to reverse it, to say enough is enough, it’s time for action.

Quoting Ursula Le Guin at a literary event is small potatoes next to chaining yourself to a pipeline. But it might generate its own kind of chain, a word chain, that can galvanize the reader into their own forms of rebellion.

Lauren Elkin is the author, most recently, of Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. My Extinction is in UK Cinemas now. Full listings: http://dartmouthfilms.com/myextinction and online with Curzon Home Cinema.

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Reviews National

Peter Bradshaw

Film Review

My Extinction review cheerfully dishevelled film maker gets stuck into climate crisis The deadpan director joins Extinction Rebellion and asks why are we so concerned with our careers when the planet is in mortal danger?

Peter Bradshaw @PeterBradshaw1 Tue 27 Jun 2023 13.00 BST

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J

osh Appignanesi is the director who has found a jaunty, funny film-making language in low-budget personal work – co-directed with his wife, Devorah Baum – about his crises with status and masculinity. The New Man, from

2016, was about impending fatherhood; Husband, from 2022, showed his complicated feelings about Baum’s career outpacing his. The second was a goofy performance in the autofictional-autofactual grey area; Appignanesi’s cheerfully dishevelled figure was at the centre of almost every shot, sometimes leaving us to wonder if and where he had staged or reconstructed certain important moments – a heightened video-diarising or guided reality.

6/07/2023, 18:27

My Extinction review cheerfully dishevelled film maker gets stuck into climate crisis | Film | The Guardian

Now, he has taken what appears to be a quantum leap to a new level of seriousness.

A professional setback just before lockdown (the sudden disappearance of funding for a projected feature) leaves him with time on his hands and Appignanesi takes an interest in Extinction Rebellion. He brings his camera to marches and meetings and is soon a deeply committed member, culminating in a triumphant speech at an XR protest outside 55 Tufton Street in central London, the notorious headquarters of climate-denying thinktanks, storming it in front of the crowd. Then his agent offers him a lucrative gig making a TV ad for Esso – and Appignanesi is tempted.

It isn’t that you doubt Appignanesi’s sincerity, although his deadpan facial expression in some of the more emotional XR meetings is sometimes difficult to read. On one march, he finds himself alongside the comedy writer David Schneider; their banter seems to relax him and the film’s punning title demonstrates his comedy instinct.

The question arises whether he has cultivated a kind of Louis Theroux ambiguity in talking to the long-term XR faithful to suppress a mickey-taking impulse, or to create the space for his audience to do the mickey-taking on his behalf. Actually, no; he later tells his wife that people’s testimonies at a certain XR meeting really had brought him close to tears. But there is a disconnect between the importance of what he is talking about and the self-deprecation and throwaway comedy that dominates his style; these worked better with smaller-scale confessionals.

Much though I always enjoy Appignanesi’s performances, the contradiction is not entirely solved. His central message is clear enough: if his career in making heavyweight films is finished, well, what of it? (I don’t believe for a moment that it is; Appignanesi is surely going to make a witty metropolitan comedy in this same minimalist style.) The planet is in danger and that is what we should be thinking about and acting on, rather than worrying about our negligible careers.

My Extinction is released in UK cinemas on 30 June.

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A complete guide to this week’s entertainment

Going out, staying in

From Indiana Jones to Wham!: a complete guide to this week’s entertainment The fedora sporting artefact chaser gets one last crack of the whip, and the bequiffed 80s pop https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jul/01/from-indiana-jones-to-wham-a-complete-guide-to-this-weeks-entertainment

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1/16

Ed Porter

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Henry Bird

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Maria Duarte

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Film Publications Kate Stables

MY EXTINCTION 15 JUL 20, 2023 · 0 MINUTES

OUT NOW CINEMAS A rambling and at times surprisingly cheerful documentary about joining Extinction Rebellion, in which filmmaker Josh Appignanesi channels his fears about climate change and his fading career into direct action. As he corrals his celebrity mates into Writers Rebel events (where Zadie Smith and Juliet Stevenson rail against big-money climate deniers), an ever-present camera slyly laps up his frustrations and banner-waving triumphs. Far less playful-slash-cringey than his docu-comedy memoirs The New Man and Husband, the film is an absorbing call to arms for anyone worried about our burning world. ■

Mona Tabbara

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Q.V. Hough

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The Indiependent ­ Elizabeth Sorrell

The Indiependent We ' r e p r o v i d i n g b u d d i n g j o u r n a l i s t s w i t h e x p e r i e n c e & Y O U w i t h i n c r e d i b l e a r t i c l e s

‘My Extinction’ Review: Have A Yoghurt And Save The World

My Extinction (2023) © Dartmouth Films

Following Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum’s videodiarised feature, Husband (2023), they turn their attention to the climate crisis. From the marital home to the streets of London, My Extinction excels in documenting the transformation of a down-on-his-luck writer to an Extinction Rebellion activist.

When Josh Appignanesi loses funding for his next feature film, he looks outwards for direction.

Appignanesi and his wife Devorah Baum document their experience with the climate activist group, Extinction Rebellion (XR). Starting off with caution, their explorations of the science, the politics,

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and the different sectors within XR lead them to their place in the movement. My Extinction is a video-diary feature that organically captures the making of two environmental rebels. The couple takes us on a fascinating journey with them. They allow us to think through (and feel through) the traumatic knowledge of climate change together. As they flit between XR’s direct action and intimate chats in their living room, we learn and develop our understanding of climate change alongside them.

My Extinction is not the first collaborative piece between Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum.

Their previous explorations of masculinity and fatherhood took on the same sardonic but equally complex feel in The New Man (2016) and Husband. This time, Appignanesi turns his attention to the XR movement. In their usual low-budget personalised style, Appignanesi and Baum document their process of grappling with the severity of the climate crisis and the means of doing something about it.

The film starts when Appignanesi loses funding for a feature film. He finds himself in a dead-end teaching job, anticipating the end of his creative endeavours for the foreseeable future. His reluctant involvement with XR seems as good a way of passing the time as any. As he discusses climate change with a range of activists from anti-natalists to seasoned XR-road-blockers, Appignanesi finds his place within XR as part of the ‘Writers Rebel’ group. Soon, his ventures lead to him and Baum giving impassioned speeches outside 55 Tufton Street, the nest of powerful climate-denialist lobbyists and think-tanks.

Before taking on Tufton, his emotional journey feels like the environmental everyman: perpetual confusion around the science followed by immobilising dread and a dash of cynical inaction. Many activists and activists-to-be must consider how much they can afford to put into a movement. Can you afford to get arrested? Can you afford to go to protests? Can you afford to shed the denial of a full-blown climate crisis?

Appignanesi starts off with an uneasy and unserious approach to Extinction Rebellion. He makes mocking comments at marches and looks totally out of his depth at emotionally intense XR meetings. This combination of Appignanesi’s cynicism as a knocked-down artist and XR’s collective meditations is rather jagged. Particularly, brief and awkward discussions with fringe activists such as anti-natalists fall a little flat as it ultimately goes nowhere and seems to be a redundant discussion among parents.

But ultimately, this is what reels us in. The ability to undertake the journey with him, to have the comfortable tea-chats with Baum where we test our assumptions and the power we have as individuals. The hopelessness, denial, and egotism of educated people is broken down and rebuilt again in the cosy living room of a communicative married couple.

This video-diarising of this psychological arc is refreshing to see. It has a personal and tangible feel. We often see conversations around climate change in intimidating spaces like in the middle of the protests themselves, academic lectures and press conference disruptions. But My Extinction offers a much warmer and inviting space to discuss our values. These important conversations can happen while you are having a yoghurt or a cup of tea.

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This juxtaposition between homely warmth and overwhelming protests flourishes in the film’s cinematography. Cups of tea and bare feet in a lamp-lit living room give us the comfort to mull over intimidating issues. But the harsh light of day at a crowded protest is the place to put those ideas to the test. We also see the same in XR meetings: warm and open discussions at the village hall are put into practice on windswept and police-patrolled streets of London.

While the film progresses, the sardonic, mickey-taking tone of Appignanesi slips away. After a couple of tea-chats, the couple enter the next protest with more verve and rigour as they gain confidence. This is the beauty of the film; it sets out to take us on the journey to rebellion together by documenting their own experience with XR. The Verdict Overall, My Extinction is a candid and sincere effort to separate the artist’s ego from the XR movement. Although we see a few confused wobbles in the vastness of the movement, My Extinction successfully brings us along on their exploration of the climate crisis. The protests are exhausting and never definitively put the climate emergency to bed. Newspapers and tabloids were notoriously uncharitable to their direct action. The accolades may never come your way.

When a lucrative opportunity arises that is markedly against your values, it is tempting to take it.

It’s easy to dismiss these challenges as the conceited whining of the privileged classes. However, they are real human obstacles to tackle when advocating for global change and I for one greatly appreciate their acknowledgement.

Words by Elizabeth Sorrell

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Blogs/Other

Yahoo Sport (as seen in The Guardian/Observer)

The Mature Times ­ Joyce Glasser

The Upcoming ­ Mae Trumata

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Earthbound Report ­ Jeremy Williams

Jeremy C Processing ­ Jeremy Clarke

Parky at the Pictures ­ David Parkinson

Richard Hartley (as seen in The Guardian/Observer)

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Local/Regional We acquired 8 regional/local reviews from around the country, including in the Camden New Journal and The Lancashire Times.

The Lancashire Times, Silver Screen Weekly ­ Jack Bottomly

Lancashire Times A VOICE OF THE FREE PRESS

Silver Screen Weekly - arts What's Coming Up At The Cinema From Friday 30th June 2023 Jack Bottomley Media Corresponde 2:00 PM 2nd July 2023

Our lm critic and media correspondent has been looking and trawling the new releases. Here's what you can see on the big screen this week.

  30th June  My Extinction (15) (British documentary following a

lmmaker

confronting his feelings around climate change and getting involved in a grassroots environmental movement.) - Friday 30th June

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The Camden New Journal (as seen in The Islington Tribune)

My Extinction: political polemic or a sideways look at how we should save the planet?

Documentary-maker turns the camera on himself to make a film about going on XR demonstrations Friday, 7th July — By Dan Carrier

MY EXTINCTION Directed by Josh Appignanesi Certificate: 12a ☆☆☆ IS Josh Appignanesi a director, an actor, a documentary-maker, a journalist or the purveyor of a satirical form of reality TV?

He combines all these roles in his latest bout of cinematic navel gazing, turning the camera on himself to make a film about him going on XR demonstrations.

In My Extinction, he considers the frightening reality we have and schools himself about how our exploitative capitalist model is essentially killing the planet.

His best known feature was the 2010 David Baddiel-scripted The Infidel, while in more recent times he was turned to using his life as a topic to document: in his film The New Man, he tackles his approaching fatherhood. In Husband, we are taken to New York with his wife Devorah Baum as she embarks on a book tour and he tags along, making great play of how useless he is at everyday life.

Here, Josh again takes centre stage. We are told that a big money film project has fallen through via a one-way conversation with his agent, and at a loose end, he discovers Extinction Rebellion and decides to possibly lend his weight to it.

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The film is a personal memoir, but because it feels staged – the way scenes are set up means this is not a camera-constantly-rolling effort with the story being made in the edit – it is hard to gauge what journey we are going on with the director / lead.

This crossing of genres leaves the viewer in a form of limbo. There is no revealing critique of climate science or the ideological battles raging. It has no fresh consideration of XR and their tactics.

At one point, as the narrative heads towards a climatic finale when Josh gives a speech at an XR demo, he reveals he didn’t know anything about what goes on at 55 Tufton Street – home to the Institute of Economic Affairs and other right-wing pressure groups that for anyone with a passing interest in progressive politics recognises as Mount Doom.

The confession adds further questions as whether this film is meant to a political polemic, or a funny, sideways look at how we should all roll our sleeves up and save the planet?

Josh instead causes raised eyebrows and confusion about what he is up to rather than laughs.

And with a topic this serious, that’s not a bad thing.

Cumbria Times, Silver Screen Weekly (as seen in The Lancashire Times)

Hackney Gazette ­ Bridget Galton

Ham & High (as seen in Hackney Gazette)

This is Local London (as seen in Hackney Gazette)

The Islington Tribune ­ Dan Carrier

The Westminster Extra (as seen in The Islington Tribune)

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