‘You're a disgrace': 12-year-old activist leaves corporate boss speechless
81 Minutes
In cinemas August 7
Reviewed by Sandra Hall
★★★★
In Future Council, a rather heavy silence falls on the conversation when 12-year-old Skye Neville tells a highly placed Nestle executive that he's a disgrace for defending the company's use of plastic packaging.
It takes him a moment to recover but by the end of the exchange, he's admitting big companies such as his can lose sight of their place in 'the wider eco-system'.
Skye comes from a Welsh village built on a coastal flood plain, which puts her on climate change's frontline, and she went through a very early conversion to activism, setting up a campaign against plastic use in children's comics and magazines.
Now she's on the Future Council – the fiercest of eight teens and sub-teens gathered by Australian documentary maker Damon Gameau, whose career as an activist began with That Sugar Film. A critical look at the effects of sugar on the human body, it made news because he doused himself in sweetness by way of proving his point.
He moved on to climate control, taking his 2019 documentary, 2040, into schools, and the kids he met there became the inspiration for Future Council. He found that many knew more about sustainability than most adults. And a thousand of them auditioned for the film, in which the successful candidates cross Europe in a yellow bus meeting fellow activists and do their best to get audiences with the senior executives of some of the world's biggest polluters.
To its credit, Nestle was one of the few of these to say yes. Another was multinational Dutch bank ING, whose chief executive seems amused at the start of his interview with the group. His response is friendly but predictably measured. He says the bank has stopped investing in coalmines and stepped away from other clients that aren't divorcing themselves quickly enough from fossil fuels but the rest can't be done overnight.
Loading
It sounds reasonable but it doesn't quite satisfy young Dutch boy Joaquin Minana, who's leading the charge. Backed up by the others, he asks if ING would consider having young people on its board or at least taken on as advisers. It's an idea that will keep recurring as the bus trip goes on, and by the time we've got to know these kids, it seems like a pretty good idea.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
A new, larger than life teaspoon sculpture lands on Sydney Harbour
Spoon-bending 'feats' of telekinesis and illusion are the inspiration for a new commission at the Museum of Contemporary Art as the gallery heroes contemporary sculpture on the harbour and tackles a multi-million dollar operating deficit. Los Angeles-based Australian artist Ricky Swallow was fascinated by Uri Geller's so-called mind tricks as a young boy growing up in the pre-internet Melbourne, and has created four warped large-scale stainless-steel spoon sculptures for the MCA's terrace which appear to have been put through the same mind wash. 'I felt like Uri Geller was on an endless world tour with that trick,' Swallow notes. 'I remember trying to bend spoons having seen it demonstrated by Uri Geller on TV. ' Swallow's Bent Forms #1–#4, scaled-up wax prints of actual teaspoons, are the first in a series of prominent sculptural commissions to be installed at the MCA over the next six months, the biggest being the inaugural Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission to be unveiled late September in honour of the late arts philanthropist. A work by British contemporary sculptor Thomas J. Price will be the first of three to be showcased over three years on the museum's prominent harbour-side verge. The details come as the MCA revealed a $2 million operating deficit for 2024. The loss, which it says is covered by cash reserves, has been attributed to the ongoing impact of the global economic downturn and rising costs of wages, energy, exhibition freight and construction. In January, it introduced admission fees for the first time in 25 years. According to its latest financial results, the MCA is now self-generating about 85 per cent of its revenue from corporate partners, patrons and commercial activities including a new-look gala fundraiser, the MCA Artists Ball, which raised more than $1.1 million. Cost-cutting would continue throughout this year, its chair, Lorraine Tarabay said, its revenue measures moving the gallery closer to a balanced budget by end of the year with the benefit of full impact felt in 2026.
The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
A new, larger than life teaspoon sculpture lands on Sydney Harbour
Spoon-bending 'feats' of telekinesis and illusion are the inspiration for a new commission at the Museum of Contemporary Art as the gallery heroes contemporary sculpture on the harbour and tackles a multi-million dollar operating deficit. Los Angeles-based Australian artist Ricky Swallow was fascinated by Uri Geller's so-called mind tricks as a young boy growing up in the pre-internet Melbourne, and has created four warped large-scale stainless-steel spoon sculptures for the MCA's terrace which appear to have been put through the same mind wash. 'I felt like Uri Geller was on an endless world tour with that trick,' Swallow notes. 'I remember trying to bend spoons having seen it demonstrated by Uri Geller on TV. ' Swallow's Bent Forms #1–#4, scaled-up wax prints of actual teaspoons, are the first in a series of prominent sculptural commissions to be installed at the MCA over the next six months, the biggest being the inaugural Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission to be unveiled late September in honour of the late arts philanthropist. A work by British contemporary sculptor Thomas J. Price will be the first of three to be showcased over three years on the museum's prominent harbour-side verge. The details come as the MCA revealed a $2 million operating deficit for 2024. The loss, which it says is covered by cash reserves, has been attributed to the ongoing impact of the global economic downturn and rising costs of wages, energy, exhibition freight and construction. In January, it introduced admission fees for the first time in 25 years. According to its latest financial results, the MCA is now self-generating about 85 per cent of its revenue from corporate partners, patrons and commercial activities including a new-look gala fundraiser, the MCA Artists Ball, which raised more than $1.1 million. Cost-cutting would continue throughout this year, its chair, Lorraine Tarabay said, its revenue measures moving the gallery closer to a balanced budget by end of the year with the benefit of full impact felt in 2026.
The Age
an hour ago
- The Age
The dissident award-winning artist keeping a close watch on China
In an upstairs room of a Collingwood gallery hangs a line of colourful prints on a wall. It's only when you look closely that you see small areas of damage, evidence of their role in a troubled recent past. Dissident Chinese artist Badiucao points to a scratch on one and steps back. 'Some of the frames are even broken', he explains, saying it was a deliberate choice to leave them this way. These works were originally slated for display in 2018 at a doomed exhibition in Hong Kong. They now open his first Australian solo show, Disagree Where We Must. One of the prints features Joshua Wong, a key figure in Hong Kong's pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. At the time it was created, Badiucao was working anonymously. But three days before the Hong Kong show was due to open, 'the Chinese government found out my identity and took my relatives into the police station, ' he says. In response, he cancelled his show. A year later he shed his anonymity and finally revealed his face and identity to the world. The scratches and dings, he explains, help tell the story of how this group of works was hurriedly removed and hidden in the months and years after the show was cancelled. The Shanghai-born Badiucao, who now lives in Australia, contributes to this masthead and is a Walkley Award winner for his cartoons, has always used his art to critique mainland China's government, its policies, and historical wrongs. This ethos is on full display in Disagree Where We Must. Held in Collingwood's Goldstone gallery, a space opened by artist Nina Sanadze this year, the exhibition takes its title from the Labor government's stated approach to China: 'We will co-operate where we can, disagree where we must, but engage in our national interest.' A room at the back of the space is devoted to a video that first screened on billboards in Hong Kong earlier this year in a test of the limits of free speech in the wake of the sweeping National Security Law implemented in 2020. In the four-second clip, Badiucao silently mouths the words 'you must take part in revolution'.
