Forget Netflix and the latest black and white series (for or against, who cares?). The actor and host Vincent Graton offers us an all-terrain story in garnotte road mode in the four corners of the world in Emergency climate, a documentary series that he has just completed for TV5. He describes this project as the most important of his career and threw himself into it body and soul for a year, through the sweat of his shirt, eating road dust and drinking friendship teas in the desert.
The effects of climate change are at the heart of the project, but it is humans and the populations on the front lines who are the stars of this moving series of authenticity and urgency. No experts, no major theories, only the field, a few leading figures from local NGOs and stunning images of what people are already experiencing almost everywhere in an unprecedented crisis which is pushing them into survival, often overnight.
“There’s no Botox, no showbiz in it. The number of times I bawled during filming was a running gag with the team,” confides Vincent Graton, wiping away a tear. The father of four children, whose youngest is 17 years old, will look misty-eyed several times during our meeting.
It’s a toned down version of the famous fiery comedian that I found this week in a café on the South Shore. “I’ve been in a thousand pieces since my return, I don’t know how to take this anymore. I spoke very little about it to my family; It’s such a hard subject. I’m really fucked…” adds the host, who will celebrate his 65th birthday in a month. The 12 countries and states visited (on 13e filming will take place in Quebec in May) have capsized it, from Japan to Peru, via Kenya or Israel.
The first three episodes of Emergency climate (Bangladesh, Senegal, Australia) shook me too. To mark Earth Day, I was preparing to talk to you about our ready-made excuses, those which keep us in the status quo and the triangle of inaction (industry-consumer-governments, which pass the buck without moving ), and finally, Graton’s show shows us a mirror broken into a thousand pieces of our procrastination and cowardice, without morals or lessons. Here’s the tip. The image is enough to present to us the state of affairs in an implacable manner.
We are shadows in an absurd nowhere. It’s war everywhere. The earth will have the last word, there are no other certainties. We just don’t want to believe it.
The royal road of the heart
“It was important, my posture… there and on my return, here,” notes the man who plays the cassandra in spite of himself. “What I saw was so horrible that even the slightest question becomes imbecile. » In fact, we do not witness the adventures of Crocodile Dundee, nor indecent voyeurism, nor the quest for happiness of a privileged white man dressed by Kanuk on the summit of a mountain in Bhutan. Nenon.
The posture is located at the level of the heart, and it is through this universal gateway that this passionate humanist manages to infiltrate everywhere, whether in the overheated plastic tents of Senegalese fishermen displaced in the desert by erosion of the sea, or in shantytowns of farmers with flooded land converted into textile workers to make two-ball bags in Bangladesh. Parents have to marry off their 13-year-old daughter because they will have one less mouth to feed.
Vincent traveled through “territories injured by this kind of climatic vortex which takes everything away”, in his words. “And through these disasters, these tragedies… so much beauty there. People who get back up, who fight, who reinvent; crossings among the Masai or in Samburu land which move us, question our comforts, our indifferences. »
What is striking about these encounters, sometimes due to chance, is both the resilience, sometimes the fatalism, a lot of ancestral wisdom, but always the survival instinct of the group which takes over. We focus on Doudou, this farmer who tries to slow down the advance of the desert and create an oasis, a pantry for his Senegalese community. “Doudou sees the link that connects us; That’s what touches me, Vincent says in the episode. As long as we do not see the global territory as our common territory, it will not work, our patent. »
The next COP would do well to remember this.
“Ecology is also relational, human relationships,” notes Vincent, who has trodden the soil of a charred Australia, flooded and cracked with immense ravines because of droughts. The territory becomes impassable. He even asks himself the killer question, both boots in the dust, staring at the camera: “Is it too late? »
But if humanity were capable of adaptation, it would not be where it is today. It would have long ago understood that a thermo-climatic apocalypse is fast approaching it and would have adapted to this situation. A psychopath doesn’t adapt. He persists. Until the end.
From denial to overwhelming observation
“For our filming in California, the researcher was yelled at by people who denied the connection between fires and climate change. Yes, there was before, but the problem is the intensity and frequency! » says the host.
In Bangladesh, we are not talking about a few thousand displaced people per year, but 40 million over the past ten years. — the equivalent of the population of Canada. 2,000 refugees per day arrive in the capital, Dhaka, 15% to 20% of the population who are constantly struggling with rising waters, and 50% to 80% of residents who are impacted by floods. .
“I expected it to be rock and roll and terrible, but I did not expect this crisis to shatter identities, ancestral ways of life, of the Masai who can no longer be nomads, of private fishermen of the sea and displaced farmers in the city. »
“People don’t care about Bangladesh,” underlines Vincent. I return with the conviction of the enormity of the personal and collective challenges. It’s mo-nu-men-tal. It will force us to redefine the world. »
Emergency climate is just the trailer for what lies ahead as we build battery factories and dams to maintain our productivity.
“Do our excuses for maintaining our way of life hold up against what you’ve seen? »
Vincent pauses… then: “No. Of course not. There’s a minimum amount to do at any given moment! »
And we haven’t even begun to consider this minimum. The mirror isn’t close enough yet.