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Fernando Meirelles and Malian musician Inna Modja take us on an epic journey along Africa’s Great Green Wall. The film shares an ambitious vision: the growth of 8000km of trees across the continent, planted to fight the effects of mass migration, resource scarcity and climate change.
Jared P. Scott is an award-winning filmmaker. Jared's climate films have screened at high level events worldwide, including NASA, NATO, the US Congress and EU Parliament. His films helped spark the fossil fuel divestment movement and galvanised the largest climate march in history, days before the 2014 UN Climate Summit.
In a world full of “disaster porn” and hectoring eco-documentaries that leave the viewer frozen with despair, The Great Green Wall stands out as filled with genuine hope and possibility. Taking the form of a 5,000-mile road trip across Africa from west to east through the Sahel - the farmlands on the southern fringe of the Sahara desert, imminently threatened with desertification - it is fronted by the highly engaging Malian singer Inna Modja, who leads us on a voyage of discovery, not only of the titular tree-planting project, “pharaonic” in scale, but of modern Africa’s popular music scene and simmering spirit of self-reliance. Capturing the colours and sounds of West Africa, and thus a feeling of being there, The Great Green Wall is deliciously Afrocentric and has a straightforward message: that the twin evils of Boko Haram terrorism and mass emigration have the same root cause, the southward advance of the Sahara sands, and thus the same solution: planting hundreds of millions of trees, a project that is already well advanced. Modja’s musical collaborators along her epic route include Senegal’s Didier Awadi, Nigeria’s Waje, Mali’s Songhoy Blues and Ethiopia’s Betty G. At times heart-wrenching but ultimately uplifting, this is a must-see. Dan MacCannell
WaZabi Films
festivals@wazabifilms.com
English