While most filmmakers think about creating an impact campaign after their film is completed, Doc Society hired Aggregate to help inform the concept of a film to be directed by Kim Reed, whom Aggregate had worked with on DARK MONEY.
Our task was to determine how a documentary film could have the greatest possible positive impact on mitigating the effect of agricultural and food systems on climate change.
It would need to be the kind of story that would reach beyond audiences the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication refer to as the “Alarmed,” Americans who know climate change is happening, is caused by human behavior, and is an “urgent threat” that requires an aggressive policy response. You know, the kind of Americans who can be relied upon to watch climate change documentaries at film festivals and on PBS and Netflix.
It would need to be the kind of story could scale the walls of partisanship that serve as a hurdle to meaningful progress toward solving an existential crisis that does not care who you voted for in 2020 — or will vote for in 2024.
And it would need to be the kind of story that could reach those who can take direct and meaningful action — farmers, government officials tasked with determining agricultural and climate change policy, and rural voters whose outsized influence relative to their numbers can determine what those government officials choose to do.
With Kim — we came up with an idea.
Stay tuned for updates!
“Rural voters are disinclined to talk to each other about climate change because they perceive it to be a polarizing political issue…Rural voters ‘self-silence’ because they underestimate how many other people — including their neighbors — are as concerned as they are.”