Bjørn Lomborg is a provocative contrarian. He won unusual prominence for a Danish academic by writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, an international bestseller that questioned assumptions about environmental decline. Many critics weighed in harshly, asserting that Lomborg’s credentials as a political scientist didn’t make him an expert on environmental science. But Lomborg stood his ground, amassed data to counterattack and became a voice to be reckoned with. As an openly gay vegetarian who often challenges liberal doctrine, he remains hard to pigeonhole politically.
In Cool It, he enters the contentious debate over global warming, amplifying points that he raised in a book of the same title. Lomborg doesn’t deny that climate change is occurring, but he believes activists need fresh responses. He takes issue with Al Gore and finds fault with prevailing strategies to control carbon emissions. Focusing on the world’s growing energy needs, Lomborg tours laboratories of future technologies such as water splitting, algae fuel and wave energy. He also raises the possibility to mitigate climate change through geo-engineering with experimental techniques such as cloud brightening. Whether you accept his views or not, the film brings a heady sense of urgency to confronting a global crisis.
Director Ondi Timoner has proven herself a versatile filmmaker with larger-than-life characters in DiG!, about a rock and roll rivalry, and We Live in Public, about an Internet visionary. Both films won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In Cool It, she briskly covers extensive territory, delving into Lomborg’s background as a Green Peace loyalist turned dissident, and detailing the free speech fight that nearly destroyed his career. She synthesizes Lomborg’s ideas with punchy visuals and includes testimony from his opponents, including Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climatologist who recently died. Firing off ideas like a tennis ball machine, Lomborg comes across as eager for debate. This film should give him plenty more occasions to engage. –TIFF
Ondi Timoner (1969-) is an American film director, producer and editor. She is the only director, along with her team, to win a Sundance grand jury award twice in the festival’s history.
Timoner graduated cum laude from Yale University and founded Interloper in 1995, and in 2004 incorporated it with Vasco Nunes into Interloper Films, LLC. She filmed the documentaries Voices From Inside Time about incarcerated women in Connecticut, winner of the Yale Film Prize – and later, The Nature of the Beast, about one woman’s heroic journey through the criminal justice system, and winner of the Bettina Russel Grand Jury Prize in Canada and The National Society for Visual Anthropology Commendation, which aired on PBS. She later went on to shoot Dam Nation, set in the oldest living civilization of sub-Saharan Africa about a WTO dam.
She created and directed for the TV series Sound Affects, the highest-rated pilot in VH1’s history, and ABC’s highly successful Switched!. Through Interloper… read more
I really wanted this to be good but unfortunately it fell short of my prior expectations. This is the only Ondi Timoner that I've been disappointed with; well, this and 'Join Us' but that title isn't listed on this site yet. Once you've created such pivotal works of the 21th century as 'Dig!' and 'We Live in Public', you certainly set the bar quite high... it can only be expected that one will fall short now and then
