The people’s premiere

Made by ‘amateurs’ with cash from ‘crowd-funding’, the new film by Franny Armstrong aims to create 250 million climate change activists

Six years ago a young woman with no film training and just one full-length documentary to her name dropped in to the Guardian to ask for some advice. Long before anyone had heard of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, she planned to make a low-budget documentary about oil and climate change. Where should she go? Try Iraq and the Niger delta, two of the most volatile, oil-rich places on earth, the grizzled environmental correspondents advised her – hoping that she would come to no harm.

Blow me, but in 15 days’ time, a bright green carpet will be unrolled in Leicester Square and Franny Armstrong, now 35, better travelled but just as singleminded, will trip down it in the company of A-list celebs, to a specially constructed solar-powered cinema. There they will see a docu-drama set in Nigeria, Iraq and elsewhere starring Pete Postlethwaite – the man Stephen Spielberg called the best actor in the world – playing an old man looking back from a climate-changed future world to documentary footage shot in 2008.


But this will be no ordinary film premiere. Armstrong’s film, called The Age of Stupid, is getting the world’s largest ever official premiere, with the whole evening being beamed by satellite direct to 65 cinemas. And because climate change affects everyone, too, it is being billed as “the people’s premiere”.

“Not bad for a bunch of amateurs making it up as they go!” says Armstrong.

But Team Armstrong are no amateurs. For most of her 20s, she worked on McLibel – an epic, low-budget documentary about McDonald’s hamfisted attempt to sue two penniless activists who defended themselves in the high court in the longest civil case in English history. The film has now been seen in 15 countries by 53 million people.

Guardian