Before the Flood

Release Date: October 30, 2016

Watch Date: May 5 – May 7, 2024

“From Academy Award-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens and Academy Award-winning actor, environmental activist and U.N. Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio, Before the Flood presents a riveting account of the dramatic changes occurring around the world due to climate change, as well as the actions we as individuals and as a society can take to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.”

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   There are some movies, some realities, that make you question your choice to have children. I don’t tend to like those movies, because I love my kids, and the feeling of guilt that I get over the world they’re going to inherit and which I am basically powerless to have any impact on for the better, that’s not a super comfortable feeling.

   At first, when we saw DiCaprio, we figured this was going to be an ego film, a bit of a puff piece. But it’s anything but. With his position within the U.N., and his celebrity status, DiCaprio gets access to amazing people and locations others might not be able to. Both Obama and the Pope are featured in this documentary.

   We jump from subject to subject, from problem to problem, but each issue feels like it gets enough focus and attention, and we need to be scattered a bit anyways because there are just so many problems facing the world.

   Bob and I had to look up the Paris Agreement, not because we didn’t know what it was, but because we wanted to know if we were succeeding. Basically, it could be a lot better, it could be worse, but it could be a lot better. It didn’t feel great to know that my home country, Canada, was the worst performing G7 country.

   By the end of the film, and DiCaprio’s final speech, I had goose bumps. And that doesn’t happen to me too often with a film.

   The thing that I think I most appreciated was the list of things that we every day people can do to help push change forward. Because while it isn’t completely in our hands, and a lot of it is up to the people we elect not being corruptible and being willing to stand up to the fossil fuel and palm oil industries, there are things that we can think of when we vote. There are lifestyle changes we can make. We might not be able to avoid all the catastrophes that we’re already experiencing – this, for example, is looking to be the hottest summer on record for my area in Canada – but we can at least mitigate them, we can hope for a reversal in the future, so that when our kids decide whether or not to have kids, they won’t feel half as guilty as I do.