The Magnitude of All Things links personal and planetary loss on a profound scale, at VIFF Centre to November 4
Travelling from Australia to the Amazon, the director finds a way through grief
VIFF Centre screens The Magnitude of All Things October 31 at 8:30 pm, November 1 at 8:10 pm, November 2 at 8:00 pm, and November 4 at 4 pm
IT’S HARD to express the profundity of filmmaker Jennifer Abbott’s deeply personal documentary The Magnitude of All Things—but one thing that’s for sure is that her 2020 NFB documentary takes on true “magnitude” on the big screen.
Tonight through next week at VIFF Centre, viewers have the chance to absorb her vast images of melting ice flows, of rumbling red forest-fire clouds, of waves overtaking tiny islands in the Pacific, and of tributaries zig-zagging through a disappearing Amazon jungle. She totes her camera to some of the most ecologically endangered places in the world—places where climate change is already taking a devastating toll.
But what sets this film by the director of The Corporation apart is how it’s rooted in deeply personal grief. She connects the larger ecological loss to the death of her own sister to cancer, in poetic, essay-like form. Memories of her own growing-up years on the waters of once-pristine Georgian Bay interweave with visits to Australia, the Arctic, and the Amazon.
Her ambitions pay off: the result gets somewhere close to the meaning of life and our place in the universe. As one of many powerful interview subjects says, choking back tears, in the film, “Everyone can relate to losing a loved one. But losing your homeland…you don’t realize how much you’ve lost until you stop and think about it.”
It's not as sorrowful as you might think. On one level, Abbott shares a way to work through grief—a feeling all of us have grappled with, in one way or another, during the pandemic; on another, complete with help from Greta Thunberg, Abbott inspires revolution and a larger purpose.
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