finland

Recipes for Disaster (Katastrofin Aineksia) (Director: John Webster): Anglo-Finn dir­ector John Webster decides to put his family (wife and two young sons) on a strict oil diet for a year and to film the res­ults. Ignore the standard archival footage and ser­ious voi­ceover about the prob­lems of cli­mate change; the most inter­esting thing about this film is def­in­itely the family dynamics. Webster’s wife is a reluctant par­ti­cipant and avoids telling her work col­leagues about the exper­i­ment, not wanting to draw atten­tion to her family. She also calls out Webster for his self-righteousness sev­eral times, at one point sar­castic­ally calling him “a real Jesus.”

And it’s a valid point. After Webster bans all oil products, including plastic, from his family’s life, things become very dif­fi­cult indeed. They try to make their own tooth­paste, with pre­dict­ably dire res­ults. They are forced to buy indus­trial rolls of toilet paper to avoid plastic pack­aging. It’s not enough for Webster, who decides they need to throw out nearly every plastic item in their house. In short, his obses­sion makes him less and less sym­path­etic as the film pro­gresses. In the eyes of his family, espe­cially his wife, he becomes well-nigh insufferable.

Luckily, by the end of the film, he’s recog­nized the ridicu­lous­ness of his beha­viour, while still acknow­ledging the import­ance of his cru­sade. After the year is up, the family con­tinue with a mod­i­fied form of their diet, while still allowing cer­tain items such as tooth­paste. Webster had replaced his car with one that had been mod­i­fied to run on biod­iesel, and he con­tinues to drive that. He buys his elec­tri­city from a green source, and equips his cot­tage with solar panels. All in all, he recog­nizes that he cannot change the world all by him­self. In fact, he can’t even change his family without some com­promise. But the film provides an enter­taining lesson in what can actu­ally be done, and it makes its points with self-deprecating humour.

Normally, Doc Soup screen­ings are accom­panied by a Q&A with the dir­ector present. Since it would go against the director’s prin­ciples to fly from Finland to Toronto just to answer ques­tions, he spoke to the audi­ence via Skype videochat. This worked remark­ably well, and showed that he was still attempting to live up to the lofty goals with which he began, to reduce his family’s carbon footprint.

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: climatechange, environment, family, finland

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