Once You Know

Streaming video - 2020

Today, like a ship entering the storm, industrial civilization faces the first symptoms of energy depletion and climate change induced collapse as scientists assert that the opportunity to prevent catastrophic climate change has passed. Are some ways of collapsing better than others? Once You Know takes viewers on an intimate trek across the abyss of a world at the edge of catastrophe, into the intersection of climate science and civil disobedience. Connected to the natural world at an early age, Director Emmanuel Cappellin's worldview is shaken while traveling aboard a giant container ship to Asia, leaving him obsessed with how to best respond personally and collectively to the planet's existential crisis. Trapped at sea with 18,...000 containers, his mind spins as he calculates the millions of goods and billions of economic transactions that will take place across the planet just from this one vessel, a cornerstone of the global growth machine responsible for altering the world's climate. Panic attacks take hold of him, and visions of apocalypse flash before his eyes. This visceral experience becomes a turning point in Cappellin's life as he ponders how climate and energy scientists manage to face similar visions on a daily basis. His quest takes him around the world to meet five of the world's leading climate scientists and energy experts who have coined a new field of study: "collapsology". They share with him the truth, chaos, and hope in their work and allow him to challenge everything he took for granted — from growth-based democracies to personal freedoms. This odyssey brings him back to himself and to Saillans, a small Alpine mountain village he calls home. In this life-size, open sky laboratory, where everything becomes once again possible: having a child, redefining questions of social justice, implementing participatory democracy, starting an energy transition...The first steps, perhaps, towards some kind of collective resilience. ONCE YOU KNOW offers a unique perspective, both personal and universal, that re-contextualizes the climate problem as not something approaching, but something already here, and charts out how we can best live in this new paradigm while attempting to mitigate its worst effects. more