T he Hulu documentary I Am Greta follows the extraordinary campaign of Greta un- berg from the very beginning to the virtual peak, when she shook the world’s ecological conscience by arriving in New York in 2019 and giving a speech in front of the UN. She previously crossed the Atlantic using a completely “green” sailing boat, which was an astonishing achievement. However, along with the adoration of young people around the world, she’s also had to face an extraordinary amount of condescension and abuse from various reactionar- ies, including those in the greatest positions of power. And yet despite being a valuable reminder of un- berg’s idealism and unselfconscious courage, the film doesn’t entirely work, writes e Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw. For a start, he writes, film-maker Na- than Grossman seems to have been alongside unberg and her father Svante unberg almost every step of the way. But the resulting image is carefully curated, perhaps because Grossman is hobbled by his (understandable) re- luctance to say anything remotely critical or even off-top- ic, and give ammunition to Greta’s enemies. Intriguingly, even bafflingly, Grossman’s film begins by showing unberg’s pre-famous self as a high-school pupil with her home-made climate strike placard, endur- ing a lonely vigil outside the Stockholm parliament every Friday with a few grumpy older shoppers coming up and telling her off for not being in school. Here she is: the non-famous nobody, and these scenes lead seamlessly to later moments showing her campaign taking off. So … does this mean Grossman has been prophetically follow- ing her career from the very beginning? Bradshaw won- ders. Grossman himself answered this question in an in- terview, explaining that he was friends with the future screenwriter of the film, who became interested in the girl who has been protesting from the very beginning. “I went to the place where she protested on a Fri- day. I didn’t even know what she looked like until then. We found her and asked if we could set up a microphone and film her. at’s how it started,” says the director. e Guardian’s critic further wonders what happened to her family? As he notes, there’s a lot about her horses and dogs, something about her Asperger’s condition... ere’s a bit about her dad, hardly anything about her mum, the singer Malena Ernman, who represented Swe- den in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009... Speaking about that in another interview, the director says that her mother was working in Stockholm at the time. A slightly unconvincing explanation, but the film still has an em- phasis on the goal of Greta’s whole story. It is interesting that this film, which had its premiere screening in Venice, appears just at the time of the COV- ID-19 pandemic, which led, ironically, to a much-desired drop in carbon emissions. However, the end of the pan- demic will result in the climate crisis returning fully to the fore, so we need to already be thinking about that now. And this documentary will certainly provide its own modest contribution to that.
FRIDAY FOR THE FUTURE I am Greta and I want you to panic! This fantastic teenager and climate activist has received her own film, which follows her global crusade for change
Mnogo godina su ljudi odbijali da me čuju, deca su bila zla prema meni. Ali nije mi bitno da budem popularna, bitna mi je klimatska pravda, kaže Greta u filmu / For many years, people refused to listen to me. Children were very mean. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice,” says Greta in the film
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