The world’s premiere film festival has jumped into the climate change debate by setting a documentary about global warming as its closing film.
The Cannes Film Festival announced Thursday that Ice and the Sky, a documentary about global warming pioneer Claude Lorius, will screen on the last day of the festival.
Directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Luc Jacquet, the film tells the story of Lorius, considered the first person to discover global warming. According to Variety, the film follows Lorius, now 82, as he “attempts to leave a life legacy – a greater consciousness of the damage that humanity is doing to their planet.”
“Cannes is a huge opportunity for this film and for what it says,” Jacquet said in a statement. “Showing this film in the world’s largest film festival is contributing to this huge challenge facing humanity as quickly as possible to secure its future and the future of the planet. My language is cinema. In different times, I would have made other films. But I make fierce cinema, political cinema, cinema that has no choice.”
Jacquet picked up an Academy Award for 2006’s March of the Penguins, which won Best Documentary and has earned nearly $130 million worldwide.
In a statement, Cannes said that the inclusion of the film on the festival schedule was meant to send a clear message to participants of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris later this year.
“Echoing and supporting the fighting of those who have been alerting for a long time, the Festival de Cannes is pleased to get also engaged by programming Ice and the Sky to close its 68th edition,” the festival said in its statement. “Programming such a film is sending it to the future and to make an appointment for a successful Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris from November 30th to December 11th 2015.”
The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 13-24.
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