German director Florian Heinzen-Ziob had been contemplating make a film about the climate crisis for a long time. It’s a subject that he feels artists and filmmakers should be approaching as a matter of conscience.
“But I couldn’t really find an angle because it is such a huge topic,” Heinzen-Ziob admits how, at first, he didn’t know where to start. Then he thought about contacting scientists. After all, they’re the ones with the first-hand knowledge. How, he wondered, were they “actually coping as human beings” with a crisis that large sections of western society have turned their back on?
Early on, the director thought he would travel around the globe and meet scientists at important institutions in different continents. But then he decided it would be a little perverse to roam so far so far afield when his subject was climate change. It made more sense, he eventually decided, to stay closer to home. “In Germany, it was much more easy because I could just do everything by train,” he tells BDE.
The Weight of the World (a world premiere this week German Competition, and within DOK.fest Munich’s Eco Cinema strand) reveals his findings.
“I started to look for protagonists but I am not a scientist. For me, it was actually hard to get access to this ‘bubble’ and also to understand it,” says the filmmaker (who is co-founder of Fontäne Film production and whose 2022 doc, Dancing Pina, screened all over the world).
Scientists are accustomed to being approached by the media for short interviews about their specialist subjects. Heinzen-Ziob was planning something very different. He wanted to know how climate change was affecting them personally. Moreover, he was planning to spend two years following his subjects and immersing himself in their world. He travelled around Germany and soon became fascinated by the work of Scientist Rebellion, an international environmentalist group prepared to become involved in civil disobedience but from “the perspective of scientists where maybe the stakes are even higher.”
Generally, scientists are expected to be neutral. They draw conclusions based on evidence. Members of Scientist Rebellion have looked hard at the data and what they have seen has so alarmed them that they have been driven to civil disobedience.
“I had the feeling that their protests maybe even cut deeper because they have this standing in society,” Heinzen-Ziob says of his subjects.
The organisation proved to be very accessible. He wrote to its press office and quickly received a reply from Dr Nana Maria Grüning, who would soon become one of the film’s main protagonists. She helped in her spare time, responding to media inquiries and printing out pamphlets in her living room.
“Of course, it is all very improvised, just people trying to make a difference,” Heinzen-Ziob says.
Through a sister organisation, Scientists for Future, the director met Dr Maria Hörhold, another of the film’s main characters. At the time, Hörhold, who is “very vocal politically,” was researching polar ice sheets which are thousands of years old and contain valuable information about environmental change. She invited Heinzen-Ziob to come and film her cutting through the ice. At the time, the documentary hadn’t yet officially started shooting but the director and his cinematographer rushed over to film her as she worked in sub-zero temperatures with her frozen samples.
At times, it feels as if the scientists are waging a losing battle. In Germany in 2019, climate change was very high in the public consciousness. Since then, the pandemic, the rise of populist right wing parties who deny climate change and increasing public apathy have caused attention to diminish.
Heinzen-Ziob was filming between 2023 and 2025. Members of Scientist Rebellion are still staging protests but their message no longer seems to be getting through in the way it once did. In the meantime, the crisis is worsening.
“All of this had to be part of the movie. I know there is an urge to be positive but we also have to ask ourselves is this really reflecting reality. My protagonists had to try to keep their energy high and still to try to fight in this moment where they are very much left alone by society,” the director strikes a downbeat note.
The project posed some unusual challenges. “On the one hand, there is too little media interest about the climate crisis, especially in fiction films and art documentaries. But on the other hand, everyone is fed up. Everyone has the feeling it is already too much,” Heinzen-Ziob acknowledges that there is a level of audience fatigue when it comes to this subject matter. Viewers have already seen plenty of images of the ”burning Amazon forest” or of ice breaking in the Antarctic.
“So how do you find different pictures?” Heinzen-Ziob asked himself how to avoid climate crisis clichés. His eventual strategy was to look at the story entirely from the subjective point of view of his protagonists.
“I made a film about activists but I didn’t want to do an activist film,’ the director states. He didn’t want to lecture audiences but, instead, gives them the freedom simply to observe the characters as they go about their lives.
“For me, it was very important to tell the story quite calmly, not with much music, and also to have a lot of different voices in the film. There are people who disagree [with Scientist Rebellion],” he continues.
The documentary is set in familiar German locations including the Alps, the sea coast and the country’s forests. It includes shots of the most famous painting by German romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich, a wanderer above the seas of fog.
Protagonists have a range of different interests. For example, Grüning is an accomplished artist who makes very delicately observed paintings of birds. “She is talking about the dying of nature and how many species we are losing right now – and her way to deal with it is by capturing them in paintings. She really loves to deal with paintings because it is not politics. It is just there and it works. I really like those moments because we are getting to know them not just as scientists but as human beings.”
Protesters trying to bring back awareness toward the problem of climate change are faced with a dilemma. If they don’t have massive public support, they are pushed toward more radical protests.
“But the moment you are more radical, the much more difficult it is to communicate this with society,” Heinzen-Ziob points out.
As we see in the documentary, the members of Scientist Rebellion are always calm and friendly, even when they’re protesting. ‘What I find important is that you have empathy with them. They are trying something, just improvising…they’re civil actors who are doing something.”
Financing for the project came from, among others, Film and Media Foundation NRW, and FFA. Mindjazz Pictures is handling the German release which has been timed to coincide with the DOK.fest Munich premiere.
As the director explains, it “makes sense to bring this film out when the universities are open, not in the holidays.” Students and faculty members are expected to rally behind the film which will be screening on tour in over 30 locations including universities, research institutions and museums.
