When naturalist David Attenborough describes a documentary as “one of the most important films of our time”, people sit up and take notice.
Earlier this month, 300 guests sat in stunned silence as A Plastic Ocean, a new feature-length exploration of the impact of plastic in our seas, made its Asian premiere at the Asia Society, in Admiralty. The film, which goes on general release on January 19, documents the unfolding of an international environmental catastrophe. It took five years to investigate the global impact of eight million tonnes of plastic being dumped into our oceans annually.
“Something indestructible should not be disposable,” says the film’s producer, Jo Ruxton, and it’s hard to disagree after witnessing a biologist perform a necropsy on a shearwater chick and extract 150 shards of plastic from the bird’s stomach. That was on a remote island in the Tasman Sea and the toxins associated with plastic are in the human food chain.
The movie was shot in 20 locations, including Hong Kong , and while celebrities such as Tanya Streeter and Ben Fogle add to the narrative, it’s the scientists who reveal the true horror story.
The full-length documentary will later be available at www.plasticoceans.org.
