Planetary Health Film Prize 2019 press release
We are delighted to announce that the winner of this year’s Planetary Health Film Prize is 2040, directed by Damon Gameau.
2040, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival 2019, is an innovative feature documentary that looks to the future but is vitally important NOW. Award-winning director Damon Gameau embarks on journey to explore what the future would look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them into the mainstream. Structured as a visual letter to his 4-year-old daughter, Damon blends traditional documentary footage with dramatized sequences and high-end visual effects to create a vision board for his daughter and the planet.
The annual £10,000 Planetary Health Film Prize is generously sponsored by the Planetary Health Alliance and is awarded to a film that highlights planetary health – an emerging interdisciplinary field that focuses on the human health impacts of humanity’s vast and accelerating transformation of Earth’s natural systems – and sets out the most compelling case and call to action.
From a shortlist of three films in this year’s Global Health Film Festival programme, 2040 was unanimously selected by an international panel of scientists and filmmakers as this year’s winner.
Samuel Myers, Director of the Planetary Health Alliance said: “Nature is under siege, and we are coming to understand that this global environmental crisis is creating an urgent public health crisis. As we change our planet’s climate, extinguish its species, transform its land and seascapes and degrade and pollute its natural systems, we fuel the greatest threat to human health of our century. Planetary health recognizes these threats and insists that we radically rethink our relationship to Nature in order to save ourselves. The Planetary Health Film Prize celebrates a film that awakens us to this moment and inspires us toward a new path forward.”
Presenting the award on Saturday 07 December, Gerri McHugh, Global Health Film Founder and Director said: “We are indebted to the Planetary Health Alliance for their most generous and visionary support of this very timely award; the partnership we have forged is central to our collective efforts to promote and reward creative and impactful storytelling on some of the most urgent issues that humanity faces in the 21st century. We are delighted that this year’s £10,000 award goes to 2040 – a most worthy winner - and we are excited and inspired by the plans that Damon Gameau and his team have developed to use the prize to further the excellent advocacy and educational work that he has started with his extraordinary film.
2040 director Damon Gameau added: "We are delighted to receive this prize. It will allow us to continue our work of using a solutions-focused narrative to inspire and engage audiences while providing them with a variety of entry points to take action and join The Regeneration.
“We will utilise the Planetary Health Film Prize money to scale our Australian school programme internationally by developing partnerships with key educational organisations on the ground in the UK and North America; adapting our existing curriculum package and School Action Toolkit for these key territories; building the infrastructure on our website to host the different versions and track uptake by teachers; and to evaluate and share the impact they are catalysing within our activated schools.”
Full press release attached
