At the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of overpopulation inquiry Misconception, a cranky viewer took filmmaker Jessica Yu to task on the grounds that her topic is urgent and she "handled it very lightly." One man's criticism is another man's tagline. Why not make a subject as bleak and obstruse as Earth's mounting human throngs entertaining and engaging? Who besides the old scold and his cronies would go see an academic lesson on film? Humanity's pressure on the world's finite resources, as he pointed out, is serious enough to merit our attention.
As is, the documentary's official one-liner to draw audiences warns against holding received ideas. Yu frontloads us with facts and pacy graphics, sealing our view that proliferating souls and lack of conservation will be humanity's undoing. That would be a misconception, as statistician/physician Hans Rosling advised the Oscar-winning director and writer, best known for her documentaries American Dreams, In the Realms of the Unreal and Ping Pong Playa.
In his featured TED Talk, Rosling argues that 80 percent of the planet's population reside in countries with 2.5 birthrates or less. Although 4 billion people have joined the species' ranks since 1960, world population growth has plateaued despite the brisk baby-making of the remaining 20 percent. Offsetting this uptick is the comparatively low life expectancy in those parts.
To head off any further eye-glazing, Yu opts for personal storytelling in sizing up what population growth means in human and political terms. The narrative unfolds in three chapters, or short films, each designed to goose our assumptions through the real dramas of ordinary people.
Our first protagonist is Bao Jianxin, a 29-year-old Beijing resident under pressure to get married by 30. Tough luck for him, China's One Child policy and preference for males have set back the dating pool by 30 million women. Nor has it helped that Bao has followed his Millennial prerogative and favored education and career over conjugal tradition. Looking for love in all the potentially right places, he goes online and even takes a How To course, but like many of his cohort in China and other nations, the odds are stacked against him. Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan (Last Train Home) joined Yu to create this segment, which deeply immerses us in Bao's world despite its condensed running time.
"Bao's story, which was going to be this romantic movie, is now a sad movie," Yu told me at the Tribeca premiere. "It's about a young man's fantasy versus the melancholic reality due to the larger conflict there."
Next up is Denise Mountenay, a Canadian pro-life activist who puts her considerable energy into lobbying against legal abortion. Her segment takes her and several fellow Evangelist Christians to New York City and the UN, where she unleashes her fervor on any diplomatic mission that will see her. Though Mountenay arouses sympathy as a former rape victim, it's a relief to reach the last vignette of Misconception's tryptic -- anything to slip her manic crusade.
For Yu, "Denise's story is a bit of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington...it's hard to predict exactly what's going to happen." Noting that "stories about bureaucracies tend to have an ingrained sense of potential absurdity," the filmmaker added, "People go into these structures wanting something. How does it turn out?"
In Kampala, Uganda Yu trains her lens on journalist Gladys Kalibbala, whose weekly column in New Vision newspaper targets the relatives of children tossed out amid staggering poverty. Sunny, indefatigable Kalibbala is quite a find. Any lesser humanist would be hard pressed to inspire hope for the multitudes surviving at society's edge." It's about one person trying to find the salvageable and elevate these little moments, even if they're small victories," commented Yu. "The last story is probably the most dedicated to the verité aesthetic...in a place with great beauty and tremendous pressure and sadness."
Dr. Rosling returns to clinch the three sagas and rattle first-world viewers into rethinking our prejudices. As he puts it, the coming peril for Earth's inhabitants originates not with third-world procreation rates, but with the consumption habits of modernized societies -- such as TFF's home country -- where the lion's share of world resources are devoured. No mention is made of the projected devourings of such forward-looking nations as India and China, yet perhaps that's for Misconception II.