"Critical" is a climate change film with a timely twist - instead of criticizing everybody else, here's some greens examining their own credentials.
It challenges a foundational principle for the green movement - being anti-nuclear - from within the movement itself.
Offering a unique perspective on nuclear energy, Critical sets out the case for nuclear energy with green activists from around England and Finland speaking up for it. We follow green party member Mark Yelland visiting various nuclear facilities and launching a unique campaign: Greens For Nuclear Energy.
The film features interviews with 2 highly respected experts in their respective fields:
• Prof. Kevin Anderson, Professor of Climate and Energy at the University of Manchester, on energy's relationship with the climate science
• Prof. Gerry Thomas, former chair of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College, and former Director of the Chernobyl Tissue Project, on the health impacts of nuclear accidents.
Interviews with Green Party members in England and Finland are intertwined with Mark's nuclear tour: a high-level storage unit, a French nuclear waste recycling facility and an underground research laboratory for a deep geological waste repository.
This film reasons that it was perfectly understandable that the early green movement campaigned (and still campaigns) to ban nuclear weapons, but that by association, this has became intertwined with opposing nuclear energy.
But - so the film argues - ‘that was then, this is now’, and that nuclear's ultra low carbon contribution is now essential to help avert a climate disaster.
