The Ants & The Grasshopper

Director: Raj Patel & Zak Piper

Usa, Malawi, 2021

74′

Synopsis

How do you change someone’s mind about the most important thing in the world? Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe they live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognize, and free themselves from, a logic that is already destroying the Earth.

Director's bio

Raj Patel (co-director/producer) is a James Beard Award winning activist and New York Times bestselling writer. He is currently a research professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.Zak Piper (co-director/producer) is an Emmy-winning and Producers Guild Award-winning documentary filmmaker most known for producing the critically acclaimed film Life Itself, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and later won a Critics Choice Award. . Zak is currently producing or directing a number of documentary projects.

Künye

Camera: Clare Major, Peter Mazunda

Editor: Katerina Simic, John Farbrother

Sound: Zak Piper

Music: Graham Reynolds

Producer: Peter Mazunda, Raj Patel, Zak Piper, Rachel Wexler