Films for Hope

Toronto Tower, Canada  Studio Precht

I wanted to share, at the Eve of 2022, the link to this amazing resource of documentaries about people, and technologies, and "New Stories" that are all about hope, sustainability, evolution, and solutions to the crisis of our time.   As the creators of Films for Action say:

 "Stop imagining the apocalypse; start imagining the revolution."

https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/cancel-the-apocalypse-documentaries-to-help-unlock-the-good-ending

Shilda winery in Kakheti, Georgia   -   Copyright  X-architecture

"Our present moment is saturated in dystopian, apocalyptic fantasies of the future.  As the late Mark Fisher said, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We can envision a thousand ways that humanity might destroy itself and the rest of the world, but positive visions of the future remain severely lacking in comparison. Why is that?

The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance. Feudalism led to capitalism. No era remains stagnant forever. But there's an invisible meme in our culture today that says capitalism is the greatest economic idea humanity has ever invented and it will never be surpassed. That's why a thousand dystopian visions of the future all imagined that capitalism stayed the same, our economic paradigm never evolved... and then the world was eventually destroyed. Could the two be connected? Is our failure to imagine something better than capitalism going to be what actually leads to "the bad ending" for humanity? 

What this points to, in our view, is a crisis of imagination.  Humans at heart are storytellers, and we enact the stories we tell ourselves. As we've written before, our culture is enacting a story that's destroying the world. If humanity is going to unlock "the good ending," we've got to imagine it first. We've got to imagine ten thousand localized versions of it. That's how things change. 

Fortunately, visions of a more beautiful, compassionate, regenerative future already exist. But since they're not being broadcast daily on the evening news, we've got to dedicate a little more energy towards broadcasting them ourselves. This is what this list of films is for. These films decided that the apocalypse is canceled. Climate change is canceled. Biodiversity loss is canceled. A comeback of this scale has never been attempted before, but that's why it's going to work.  The people in these films aren't listening to the folks that say it's too late. They're imagining the future they want, not the future they're afraid of, and they're bringing that future into being.

Whether we're ultimately successful is not the point, and beyond anyone's ability to truly know. The point is that our true nature calls us to choose determination over defeat, and resilience over despair.   We hope these films inspire the former - that place in your heart that knows a better world *is* possible, and is ready to make it happen."

The New Story - from the Findhorn Community

“While the traditional origin and journey stories are needed, none of them 

can provide the encompassing context such as is available in this new story.” 

Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 98-9).

The Findhorn Community is one of the great Ecovillages teaching sustainability and true Relationship with the Earth.  There are others, quite a few others, seeds of what is to come, although we rarely if ever hear about them in the popular media.  As the G.O.P. shamefully proposes to remove the Environmental Protection Agency, and denies climate change.......it is important to find sources of hope for our planet, and our children.  Here's a movie the Findhorn Community made, a movie about how we are, and can, weave together a New Story about how to live and be on our beautiful Mother Earth, and as we tell the "new stories", it is my hope and prayer that the hate and ignorance and greed ends before it is too late.



to see the whole movie:  http://newstoryhub.com/film/watch/

From the Introduction to the New Story Hub:

"For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation".......................Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth

As we change our story, we change our world.

We humans find our way by story. Our stories shape us, hold us and give meaning to our lives. Every so often it becomes clear that a prevailing story is no longer serving. Now is such a time. Humanity needs a new, inspiring picture of the future to live into.

This website is designed to support the emergence of a coherent new story for humanity and the production of practical, collaborative ways to live this new story.

We invite you to help us accelerate our collective understanding of what the ‘world in waiting’ holds for us, what is already emerging and what needs to change, both in us and in the human story.

As a first step in this journey already begun by others, the Findhorn Foundation gifted to the world the New Story Summit: Inspiring Pathways for our Planetary Future, which was held from 27 September to 3 October 2014, a gift economy gathering of the human family to experience planetary community, draw on our collective intelligence and co-create a story to inspire us all.

The Summit was more than full so we know there is huge support and longing for a new way to live together – a way which honours ancient wisdom and the interconnected whole living system of which we, the Earth and the cosmos are all part. It’s all connected and we are all accountable. To find out more, visit our Summit page.  This online hub will continue to be just that – a hub for people from all over the world to meet, engage, collaborate, share information, dream, synergise and inspire each other to live a new story.

If you would like to join this wave of collaborative action to shift consciousness and build on the threads of a new story already being lived and experimented with, you are very welcome. We invite your engagement, transparency, trust, compassion, innovation, entrepreneurship and generosity of spirit.