APRIL 20: REVOLUTION     Showtimes 7 + 9:30
Rob Stewart      CANADA,     2012    English 90 minutes
With: Rob Stewart, David Hannan, Boris Worm, Emily Hunter, Felix Finkbeiner

A runner-up for the Cadillac People’s Choice Documentary Award at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival®, Revolution is an impassioned, angry yet hopeful call to arms against the destruction of our planet’s precious marine life.
Director Rob Stewart, whose Sharkwater was one of the highest-grossing Canadian documentaries ever made and a Canada’s Top Ten selection in 2006, expands the scope of his earlier film — which dealt with the numerous threats that are effectively wiping out the world’s shark population — to examine the mortal dangers facing marine life around the world. Travelling the globe to chronicle the efforts being taken — and not taken — to stem the tide of destruction, and plunging into the ocean depths to observe their wonders first- hand, Stewart examines our destruction of our own invaluable natural heritage.
As with Sharkwater, the key virtue of this new film is Stewart’s boundless compassion and tireless advocacy for the species he loves, and his profound outrage over how poorly we treat our planet. Attending another failed environmental conference, where few decisions are made and little or no action is taken, he angrily dismisses the whole proceedings as a farce, and castigates those governments whose token nods to environmental sustainability are accompanied by wholly disingenuous actions. He is especially enraged at Canada’s Conservative-led government, which has withdrawn Canada from the Kyoto Accord and which, he argues, has broken our country’s own laws with the Alberta tar sands project.
Yet despite the spectacle of governmental inaction and the terrifying data on marine decline that it relentlessly presents, Revolution is above all infused with a sense of wonder and hope. The underwater photography is breathtaking, capturing the sense of awe that Stewart felt when he first became intrigued by aquatic life as a child. And while the seasoned activists at the environmental conference have little to offer in the way of answers or leadership, Stewart sees a new face of the movement in the youth who plead with the leaders to do something about climate change and the dangers facing the planet. Part memoir, part eco-critique, Revolution leavens its anger and despair with its enduring, inextinguishable hope.