Planet in Focus 2013: Last Call Review

Last Call

Last Call (Closing Night Film)

While it has become a hot button issue to talk about how human progress and potential might be doing more harm than good, it took 40 years for the world to finally listen to a group of devoted MIT researchers who tried telling this to everyone back in the 1970s.

Chronicling the creation, theorizing, publishing, fall out, influence, and history of the controversial environmental treatise The Limits of Growth, Italian filmmaker Enrico Cerasuolo’s film isn’t as dryly academic as the tome at the core of the film would suggest. It’s actually quite exciting to hear of how the book – funded by progressive Italian businessman and major FIAT bigwig Aurelio Peccei and written by a team headed up by researcher Dennis Meadows in the States – was summarily dismissed at the time despite a wealth of evidence now coming to light that can document once and for all just how hard it was to deliver such a hard-to-swallow message in the first place.

Even more relevant now in the wake of recent documentaries like Surviving Progress, The Human Scale, and Watermark (all of which cover the similar core question at the heart of The Limits of Growth), Cerasuolo looks at a serious topic from a historical perspective with an affably nostalgic and sometimes amusingly nerdy eye.

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Screens

Sunday, November 24th, 7:00pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox



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