[Reader-list] Invitation | Screening of "Surviving Progress" by Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks, Bangalore

[rohitrellan at aol.in]

The Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) invites you for the screening of Surviving Progress by Mathiew Roy & Harold Crooks on 25th April, 2014 at 6.00 pm at the IIHS Bangalore City Campus (address: No. 197/36, 2nd Main, Sadashivnagar, Bangalore - 560080). The director, Mathieu Roy, will join us via Skype for a discussion after the screening of the film. 


Synopsis:
“Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.”
Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement as awe-inspiring and double-edged. It reveals the grave risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. With rich imagery and immersive soundtrack, filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks launch us on journey to contemplate our evolution from cave-dwellers to space explorers.
Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired this film, reveals how civilizations are repeatedly destroyed by “progress traps” — alluring technologies serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. With intersecting stories from a Chinese car-driving club, a Wall Street insider who exposes an out-of-control, environmentally rapacious financial elite, and eco-cops defending a scorched Amazon, the film lays stark evidence before us. In the past, we could use up a region’s resources and move on. But if today’s global civilization collapses from over-consumption, that’s it. We have no back-up planet.
Surviving Progress brings us thinkers who have probed our primate past, our brains, and our societies. Some amplify Wright’s urgent warning, while others have faith that the very progress which has put us in jeopardy is also the key to our salvation. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking looks to homes on other planets. Biologist Craig Venter, whose team decoded the human genome, designs synthetic organisms he hopes will create artificial food and fuel for all.
Distinguished Professor of Environment Vaclav Smil counters that five billion “have-nots” aspire to our affluent lifestyle and, without limits on the energy and resource-consumption of the “haves”, we face certain catastrophe. Others — including primatologist Jane Goodall, author Margaret Atwood, and activists from the Congo, Canada, and USA — place their hope in our ingenuity and moral evolution.
Surviving Progress leaves us with a challenge: To prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.



DIRECTOR MATHIEU ROY
CO-DIRECTOR HAROLD CROOKS
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS MARTIN SCORSESE, EMMA TILLINGER KOSKOFF

PRODUCERS DANIEL LOUIS, DENISE ROBERT
WRITTEN BY HAROLD CROOKS & MATHIEU ROY


Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjjkJPnmbM


Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1384249791857112/1385453011736790/?ref=notif&notif_t=plan_mall_activity




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