Synopsis

These days, it’s not enough to recycle your cardboard. The age of climate awareness has arrived, but is there still time to act? Children and young adults are facing this very question right now, and the call to act has never been stronger. How are activists dealing with the realities of the climate crisis, and how is this exacerbating dilemma affecting their mental health? In Doomsday Kids, we take an in-depth look at how two young climate activists grasp these earth-shattering quandaries and face the hard truths of today’s warming world. 

This short documentary features two main characters. The first is the filmmaker herself, Barb, who acts as the narrator throughout the film, admitting the honest nature of her mental health as it pertains to the climate crisis. These revelations are professed to the audience through her 250-mile journey across the beautiful Rocky Mountains, a journey just as mental as it is physical. The second is a woman in her early 20s, Gracie, whose job it is to educate people on fossil fuel divestment, a global movement to shrink the fossil fuel industry. Gracie teaches college activists across the country how to get their dire messages across safely and effectively to those in power. 

Doomsday Kids will use voice-over speech about the narrator’s own struggles to find happiness in today’s world, set over footage from her journey on the Colorado Trail. The beautiful 4k images the audience drinks in are soured by the unhappy reality of life with climate change, but not all hope is lost. The filmmaker will use observational footage to follow Gracie as she works behind the scenes, hosts leadership classes and leads climate demonstrations in an effort to make her mark on the world. Informal dialogue between Gracie and Barb will reveal the dark personal realities of what it takes to be a climate activist in America in 2022. 

Every activist must find their individual balance between mental health and activism. The consequences of failing to do so can end catastrophic burn-out, as we learn from Gracie and Barb. 

Understanding the harsh realities about the state of our world can be not only daunting, but paralyzing, and those who suffer must find their own methods of recovery. For filmmaker Barb, that means making a documentary about climate anxiety. For Gracie, it means leading the national movement to get American universities to divest from fossil fuels. Regardless of how, today’s youth are rising to the challenge of the climate crisis. 

But what’s the point if it’s too late anyway?