Robert Wright does not exactly predict a bright future for the world in intellectual documentary
SURVIVING PROGRESS (Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-924-3363
survivingprogress.com
www.cinemavillage.com
The highly intellectual documentary Surviving Progress begins by evoking Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cutting from a chimpanzee studying miniature monolithic blocks to an astronaut floating in space. That is followed by author and lecturer Ronald Wright looking our in front of him, carefully considering his words before saying, “In defining progress, I think it’s very important to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress. . . . We tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements from the human point of view.” Over the course of the next eighty minutes, directors Mathieu Roy (Ecclestone’s Formula) and Harold Crooks (The Corporation) unveil a stream of scientific and cultural experts who explain that change is not always good. Inspired by Wright’s bestselling book A Short History of Progress, the film explores how twenty-first-century advancements have come with increasingly dangerous caveats. “We’re now reaching a point at which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers threaten the very existence of humanity,” Wright explains. Wright is joined by a parade of experts, including author Margaret Atwood, primatologist Jane Goodall, environmental professor Vaclav Smil, the No Impact Project’s Colin Beavan, tour guide Chen Ming, cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus, geneticist and activist David Suzuki, Synthetic Genomics CEO J. Craig Venter, Friends of the Congo’s Kambale Musavuli, and others, who delve into discussions of deforestation and overpopulation, banking and finance, politics and religion, science and nature, evolution and revolution, and the everyday struggles of families across the globe. “We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history,” theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says. “But I’m an optimist.” After watching Surviving Progress, it’s not so easy to be filled with any such hope. (Surviving Progress opens April 6 at Cinema Village, with codirector Crooks participating in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening on April 7.)