Nobody predicted the immense success of Australian Damon Gameau’s 2015 directorial debut, That Sugar Film, a candy-coloured, Supersize Me-esque documentary exploring the effects of consuming sugar while on a supposedly healthy diet. It was a smash hit in its home country, becoming the highest grossing non-Imax Australian documentary in history (since overtaken by Jennifer Peedom’s majestic 2017 doco Mountain).
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. Gameau took an issue relevant across cultures and demographics, and prised it open with a broadly accessible style that neither bored nor talked down to young people – who form much of his target demographic.
The director-presenter inhabited the role of a cool school teacher doing what all cool teachers aspire to do: making education fun.
For his follow-up film 2040, which had its Australian premiere this week at the Gold Coast film festival, Gameau turns his focus to the health of the planet, keeping broadly the same upbeat approach. While That Sugar Film contained horrific visions of dental apocalypse that no doubt compelled young’uns to brush their teeth out of sheer, gum-gobbling terror, the overall message remained optimistic – emphasising the power we have to shape our bodies and lives.
Similarly, when applying the stethoscope to the earth’s wellbeing, Gameau positions himself as a glass-half-full idealist, with his first mission to convince people that they can make a difference.
Dividing his focus into key areas, including renewable energy and alternative transportation, with corresponding on-the-road case studies, he structures the film as a one-way conversation with his four-year-old daughter, who will be 25 when the titular year arrives and, he hopes, part of a brighter and better world.
The outlook of the film is refreshing. There’s no shortage of gooseflesh-raising documentaries that tell us, not without justification, that the world is going – or has already gone – to the dogs.
“I think there’s room for a different story,” Gameau says, in the garden with shovel in hand, near the beginning of the film. It is peppered with Kids Say the Darndest Things-type interviews – pipsqueaks discussing their ideal solutions to the world’s problems. Presumably Gameau was delighted by the sight of thousands of Australian kids walking out of school last month, protesting against the government’s inaction on fossil fuel emissions.
The overarching approach of 2040 is not unlike aTV program, such as Todd Sampson’s Redesign My Brain, in which an engaging host tracks down experts who have spent their lives researching subjects that are relatively new to the presenter.
Gameau’s pitch is that he has the skills to distil complex ideas into thoroughly digestible chunks. This is where we see his auteurial voice emerging – creating visual innovations that add some bling to potentially dry subject matter.
For instance, he gives interviewees the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids treatment, reducing them to tiny figurines in aesthetically engaging environments –on a Monopoly board or perched atop a shovel.
But given the episodic nature of 2040, and the complexity of each topic – all of which could easily form entire documentaries themselves – it is clear that a feature-length film isn’t the ideal format.
A television series, with an episode per subject, would make an obviously more accommodating format. Although, given how well That Sugar Film went down, it is hardly a surprise that the producers decided to try and replicate its success.
A series would have given Gameau room to expand areas that are largely absent from his remit, such as the hurdles of revolutionising power grids, or replacing all cars with self-driving group rideshare vehicles. Or even, in a perhaps unfathomably optimistic thought, the end of billboard advertising.
It’s understandable why the film-maker didn’t want to get bogged down in tackling those awfully adult, awfully sobering ideas of vested interests, which in a nutshell explain many of the aforementioned hurdles. In 2040, Gameau defaults to the position of inspiring people rather than alarming or overwhelming them. You leave the film wanting more, not less, of these sorts of productions.
