Following an award-winning festival run, Jared P. Scott’s (Requiem for the American Dream) The Great Green Wall, an epic journey to the front lines of climate change, makes its theatrical and digital premiere starting in Canada July 30th.
In this documentary, executive produced by Fernando Meirelles (director of City of God, The Two Popes) and Biz Stone (Co-founder of Twitter), Malian musician-activist Inna Modja traverses Africa’s Sahel region, one of the most vulnerable places on earth, to help grow an 8,000 km’ Wall of trees’ stretching across the entire width of the continent. Spanning through Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Niger and Ethiopia, where temperatures are rising 1.5 times faster than the global average, the Wall offers a solution to the accelerating land degradation as well as hope for the estimated 1 billion feeding off the agriculture. If this doesn’t work, there could be a massive exodus of 60 million people forced to leave Sub-Saharan Africa. And if successful, not only would the Wall restore land and provide a future for millions of people, it would become the largest living structure on earth, three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef — a new world wonder.
In this Buena Vista Social Club meets Years of Living Dangerously documentary, frontline characters give voice to a continent at a crossroads — stories Modja echoes on a sublime album with the support of insightful musical collaborators (Didier Awadi, Songhoy Blues, Waje, and Betty G). Although a climate change cautionary tale, The Great Green Wall is a refreshing story of resilience, optimism, and collection action. It reveals our shared human condition and reflects the moral question we all must confront: “Will we take action before it’s too late?”
Shines a light on one of the world’s most ambitious but unsung initiatives to tackle climate change
— Variety