Canada 2020, 86 min Director JENNIFER ABBOTT
Wildfires, floods, devastation, extinction: the gravity of our existential climate crisis becomes a deeply intimate rumination on both personal and global grief in Jennifer Abbott’s The Magnitude of All Things. Still reeling from the death of her sister from cancer, Abbott—who co-directed another DocLands feature, The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel—began tracing parallels between her experience of loss and the overwhelming shared sorrow of people on the frontlines of climate change. Through exquisite dream-like footage and letters and poems penned by her sister Saille, Abbot begins to make peace with grief, finding hope and beauty in the poignancy of moments shared. Refusing to be defeatist, Abbot’s powerful cinematic journey illustrates how deep acceptance of death and climate change provide profound lessons toward accepting life. With rich sound design and stunning photography, The Magnitude of All Things traverses the Earth in search of how we can turn grief into necessary action.