Apocalypse Now? Dark Visions At Toronto Film Festival

A new wave of documentaries at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival poses a disturbing question: is environmental and social disaster on a global scale imminent and perhaps inevitable?

Doomsday visions captured by three filmmakers at the annual industry event may have seemed a bit implausible only a couple of years ago. But after the global economy’s near-death experience over the past 12 months, such ideas may no longer strike audiences as radical or hard to fathom.
“Compared to … even five years ago, a lot has changed in the consciousness of people about the environment,” said director Peter Mettler about his film “Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives of the Alberta Tar Sands.”

Mettler presents a bird’s eye view of the sprawling oil-sands projects carved out of the boreal forests of northern Canada, capturing the massive scale of the destruction there. His is not the only film to spell gloom, and even doom.

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Finally, there is a single person’s point of view taken to apocalyptic heights in “Collapse,” which tells of Michael Ruppert, a Los Angeles cop turned futurist who sees the global financial crisis and dwindling petroleum reserves as nothing less than the beginning of the end to industrialized society.

Ruppert’s ideas revolve around the notion of “peak oil,” which says the world is rapidly running out of the only substance that can power civilization as we know it.

New YorkTimes