A few weeks before Christmas last year my worst fears were confirmed when Guy McPherson's latest
book “Going Dark” arrived in the mail as a present. Some present!
In the book McPherson lays out a very convincing argument that humankind is doomed.
As a student of politics, the environment, the environment of politics and maybe most importantly the
politics of environment I had long suspected something was terribly wrong. I was filled with a deep
sense of foreboding that grew by the day! Half-hearted efforts to increase automobile fuel mileage
standards by a few percentage points over the next two decades while denying human driven climate
change seemed the very definition of obscenity.
That's when it hit me! The reason politicians were doing virtually nothing to stop the headlong rush
towards environmental catastrophe was because they knew nothing could be done. It was a huge,
concerted effort at plausible deniability between government at the highest levels and big energy.
If the asteroid is streaking towards Earth and there's nothing to be done...than why do anything?
Why indeed!
So I decided to make a movie about the fate that almost certainly awaits us. That movie is “22 After”.
I realized early on that this topic, the end of all humanity in the next few decades (otherwise known as
Near Term Human Extinction), is an absolute 'buzz kill' at parties, family get-togethers, around the
water cooler, etc. And if even talking about NTHE is that toxic why waste precious time trying to find
the investors that would be needed to hire professional actors, film crew, editors, etc.?
The answer was to do a zero-budget docu-drama. And that's what you see in “22 After”.
I wrote the script in a few weeks, put out a call for volunteer actors, and handled the camera and editing
myself. I spent most of my professional career as a TV News reporter so I have a fair amount of writing
ability, can shoot and edit video in a pinch, and am not shy when it comes to asking favors.
We started weekend filming in February and were all wrapped up by May. I finished editing by the
end of June and “22 After” was done. We entered in a couple of film festivals but after a two month
wait to find out we didn't make it into the first of those I decided to pull the plug and make the movie
public for the benefit of several hundred social media followers who had been supportive from the
outset.
For the time being I have decided to keep the viewing of “22 After” completely free as it sounds
somehow obscene to ask people for money to tell them the worst news they will ever hear. In the future
I may change my mind but only to raise funds to spread the word; people need to wake up, plans need
to be made.
But for now the best payment I can hope for is for you the viewer to tell everyone you know “watch
this movie”.
Thank you,
Mark Thoma