This has been a rough summer for Planet Earth, what with repeated heat domes in the United States, wildfires in Hawaii, Canada, and Greece, floods in a whole lot of places, the highest ever average sea temperatures globally, and a lot more I won’t bother to list here. More significantly, these extreme events look like they’re going to be our new normal—more fires, more floods, more 100+ degree temperatures—but it remains an open question how we should respond. Meanwhile, migrants continue to die trying to enter Europe or the United States, and even within those prized destinations, increasing inequality and political extremism are growing concerns.
If you’re perfectly fine with a future consisting of more of the same, you should probably stop reading now, because you’re not going to be interested in this film. If, however, you think that global warming, economic inequality, and political polarization are not only important, but also can’t be solved by individual behavior alone, you’re just the audience for Pernille Rose Grønkjaer’s documentary Solutions. That goes double if you think the issues we’re facing today today require big ideas and a willingness to question even the most ingrained of assumptions about how to live ethically in the world.
Solutions was recorded at a conference at the Santa Fe Institution in New Mexico (the film is cagey about when said conference took place, other than that it was before the pandemic). It’s a lot more interesting than you would expect from a filmed conference, thanks in no small part to the excellence of the technical elements, including cinematography by Ben Bernhard, editing by Per Sandhold, music by Jonas Struck, visual effects by Anders Huulgaard, and sound design by Jacques Pedersen. There’s a nice variety in the camera angles and framing, there’s a nice selection of quotations presented on title cards, and the film regularly cuts away from the conference with footage illustrating whatever point is being made. Put it this way: if you think of this conference as the equivalent of a stage play, Grønkjaer has done a great job of opening it up to make an effective movie.
The speakers propose a number of solutions for different problems, which are helpfully grouped into categories and summarized in graphics at the end of each section. Granted, many of these are on the general side (“Identify main challenges and work across disciplines”), legally implausible if not impossible (“no advertising on social media”) or already familiar (“reduce number of friends on social networks”). Still, an idea doesn’t have to be new to be good, not every proposed solution has to come with an implementation manual, and Solutions allows you to see the process by which these suggestions were arrived at.
There’s lots of good ideas in this movie, but one thing you shouldn’t come looking for is diversity. The 20 conference attendees, described in a title card as “a group of world leading scientists and innovators,” are articulate and thoughtful, but also predominantly male and white. If you pay attention the amount of time each person speaks in the film, and how they are presented (as experts presenting to others as opposed to participants in a more general discussion), it becomes even more a chorus primarily of white men. I’m not blaming the filmmaker—she didn’t choose the speakers—but it does point to a problem with the assumptions behind the conference itself. Excluding whole classes of people from any real decision-making power is part of what got us to our current situation, so it’s ironic to see the same old power structures replicated rather than challenged in a setting that thinks it’s part of the solution. | Sarah Boslaugh
*Because a lot of these ideas are already out there in the public sphere, they just don’t have the kind of political backing that could make them a reality. Will it help to hear them said by white, credentialed, mostly male individuals in a prestigious setting? Only time will tell, but it can’t really hurt, any more than the incessant repetition of neoliberal assumptions by people at varying levels of knowledge and expertise has weakened their claims on truth.
Solutions is available for streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, and iTunes beginning September 12.
