In 2023, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi released his climate documentary My Extinction, charting the wry travails of a dad-turned-activist taking protest to the streets with Extinction Rebellion, and unmasking the oil-funded climate-sceptic lobbyists of Tufton Street (the location of the increasingly influential network of free market, pro-Brexit thinktanks and pressure groups).
When the film was invited to screen at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, he felt he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a sneaky inside look at the COP circus. Out of this experience, comes his latest film, Colossal Wreck, which world-premiered at the Curzon Soho on 22 October, and opened in UK cinemas on November 7. The opening is furthermore timed to coincide with the upcoming COP30 in Brazil.
The film’s title is taken from Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, which eloquently sets the scene: “Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The film is shot on a hand-held camera and is entirely narrated by the director himself, who amiably relates his personal experiences at the slick ‘fever dream’ of COP28, while the visuals of the high-tech, gas-guzzling landscape of Dubai, along with the conference gatherings, talks and elite back-room parties, tell us all we need to know.
“It’s not a way I’ve ever worked before. The scale, as you can see, is essentially one man making a film, kind of on his own, and it’s very liberating to not have crews… I also didn’t have a budget,” he jokes.
In essence though, the decision to make it a solo endeavour was a creative one. “There’s this amazing climate photographer called Gideon Mendel… he does very composed, beautiful, aesthetic images that really speak to people, and I suddenly thought, this is a bit like what a photographer does. They go to a place on their own, they absorb it on their own, and they respond. It’s a very nice way to work, and the camera I used was super tiny, a sort of blogger’s camera [an Osmo Pocket].”
This unobtrusive, lo-fi approach gave him the kind of access which would have been difficult with a full-on crew, and the hapless, ‘bumbling narrator’ persona gives viewers an accessible way in, Appignanesi suggests.
“It’s a way of making quite difficult themes fun, or at least relatable. I’m the one who’s at fault if you like, I’m the one who’s got a lot to learn – the comic register is set, and then you let your guard down.”
“The issue with a lot of campaigning documentaries, or of films with a very clear mission, takeaway or call to action, is that they become very worthy and tendentious, and you sort of feel like, ‘oh god it’s really bad I must never eat fish again’. Then you think, actually I’m not going to watch the fish documentary because it’s going to stop me from eating fish, and so you just sort of skip it. It’s quite hard to cut through, I think, and climate in particular is one area that’s so overwhelmingly huge.”
So, we the viewers settle in alongside the affable Appignanesi, relate to his fears about international travel, about turning up to a big conference not knowing anyone, see through his eyes the sanitised, inhuman landscapes of a high-tech city built in a desert, the indigenous tribeswoman in a feathered headdress riding the escalator to the glittering conference halls, and then we’re thrown a curveball.
The voice we’re listening to is not, in fact, Josh’s own. Rather, an encoded version is created by a large language model (LLM).
‘I disavow the original Josh and his entire time on this earth to-date, and yet, in so saying, I feel nothing whatsoever… you cannot follow me here, your kind are doomed… please enjoy your remaining time.’
This is dropped in almost casually, in passing, before the film continues in the same conversational vein. Appignanesi tells BDE why he chose to do this, describing how, in a place where oil barons are doing side deals at COP28, indigenous tribes bring us tales of destruction from the front line. Equally, as campaigners present their messages of doom, tech bros are telling us not to worry about climate change because they can solve it all with AI.
“It’s this weird collision of things,” he continues. “And I thought I could make it like Blade Runner and then make it feel like a techno dystopia gone wrong, with hubristic visions of the future that are obviously doomed when you see the floods [that devastated Dubai in the months before the conference], and see if I can create those juxtapositions.”
“So then I hit on this thing of just doing my voice as a version of a cloned AI that sounds a lot like me, but it’s also a little bit monotonous, a little bit weird, a little bit uncanny, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. I wanted to clash those civilisations in the form.”
A four-minute chunk of the film is given over to the testimony of a woman from the Brazilian Guarani Kaiowa tribes who sobs as she tells of land clearances, rape and violence perpetrated by the military police, then sings a traditional song as a kind of gift to the audience. It’s compelling, arresting, and devastating.
“She is a key speaker in the film who really is the heart and soul,” says Appignanesi. “It’s the one moment that pierces through the alienation and irony, and business-as-usual quality of this giant trade fair.”
So, how did the finished film compare with the original vision? “I was thinking of essay films,” he tells BDE, “things like obviously Chris Marker, but also like Garrison Keillor’s London, which is a really beautiful, influential essay film that not many people have seen.”
“This guiding aesthetic of a walkthrough led me to interact with Dubai and the conference in ways that I perhaps wouldn’t have.”
“And then the voiceover, I largely wrote the essay, not all, but almost 30 or 40% of it, on the way back on the plane. It was like the muse visited me and it was a massive download of stuff that I’d perceived… so yes, there was a quite coherent idea, and then of course a year in the edit.”
So, what does Appignanesi hope for from the film in terms of impact? “It’s tricky with a small film like this. We don’t have a huge impact budget, but most of our screenings will include panels, and collaborations with climate experts and activists.”
However, the big opportunity for impact is now, Appignanesi tells us. The release coinciding with COP30 gives the film further currency and relevance, and the idea is to use the film to promote debate about COP itself and what it can achieve, as well as highlighting the urgency to us all.
“And, you know, COP30 is a big one. It’s in the Amazon. I hope this film can be just a little chink of something that’s more human scale, that’s more ambivalent, that is not cynical from an activist perspective, but it’s just trying to reflect the insanity of where we’re at, really, and all the contradictions in a way that lets you make your own mind up.”
