How British film director Josh Appignanesi overcame anxiety to change the world

I say: “This is all great but to me it feels tragic because nothing these nice people do will work… I despair, I’m a pessimist.” And he says (or shrugs), “Course. You’re Jewish.”

Cut to me in an abstract, barren stormscape looking pensively into the middle-distance.

I left that line in because I wanted to explicitly out myself as belonging to a history, including things in my own family, that track cleanly to the climate crisis: mass death, forced migration, embattled political structures expressing themselves through populist strongman authoritarianism, racist blame and anti-immigration, a sense of unhomedness.

Resistance, failure of resistance, failure in general.

“Failure in general” doesn’t sound like the obvious slogan for committed climate action. Go, Team Failure!

"But the Jewish familiarity with and openness to what we might call negative states or unpleasant feelings — feelings such as despair, anxiety, guilt — are pretty important to admit if we’re to deal with our reality rather than using all our energy denying it.

"And that certainly includes climate denial, even the soft version of “well, what can I really do anyway, oh dear, better pick up the kids in the comfort and security of my enormous SUV”.

Do I really believe Jewishness can function as some sort of antidote to this half-willed blindness? Or to the creeping fascist tendency in our midst?

That’s my hope, I guess. The hope that Jewish history has laid down the kind of sensibility that can open a door, at least.

Open us up to an admission of failure, as in, our political and economic systems — systems that consistently make many of us feel like failures on a personal level — are also demonstrably failing at the global level of environmental devastation and mass inequality.

The two go together: we’re killing ourselves. The kids know it, so it might be good if we could admit it too.

Josh and Alfie

Josh with a fellow campaigner (Photo: Scott Burrows)

Of course, that will require us to experience the unbearable feelings such admissions arouse. We may need some black jokes to mitigate them (things Jews are good at).

So yes, the film is funny. Defensively so at first, because I was defensive, and then hopefully with an irony that lets in some sincerity— that being my own trajectory, basically.

It also needed to be funny because climate films are seldom funny, and doom and guilt are a bit of a turn-off on a rare night out at the movies.

Humour lets us see our own hypocrisy in a non-rebarbative way, lets us relate a bit. Or to put it another way: if this shmuck can get climate active, hey, maybe I can too.

The films ends with a call to action: join a local group. That’s what I’d like you to do. Give up one evening a week to hang out with others who share your concerns.

If XR isn’t your speed, there’s the RSPB, or Friends of the Earth, or just get your shul or your workplace to get together. Because you can. Because it really matters, and you’ll feel less of a failure to boot. I’ll come with you if it helps.

The real call to action, though, is buried earlier in the film. “It all seems impossible. But then I thought: if not me, who? If not now, when?”

‘My Extinction’ is showing in cinemas nationwide, including at JW3 on Sunday (July 2).
dartmouthfilms.com/myextinction