Director’s Statement
We came to this film as environmentalists — people who have spent careers documenting what is being lost and why. We believed in the science, we believed in the urgency, and for a long time we believed that the problem was simply that not enough people had been shown the evidence. Then we watched another election cycle come and go, another round of climate legislation stall, another decade of movement-building produce a movement that was, by any honest measure, not moving the people it needed to move.
We started to suspect the problem wasn’t the science. It was the story — and who was being allowed to tell it.
What drew us to these four subjects wasn’t the novelty of conservatives who cared about the environment. It was the sophistication of how they operated inside their own communities: the language they chose, the values they leaned on, the arguments they made to people who would have tuned out the same message delivered by someone who didn’t share their worldview. We wanted to observe that from the inside — not to hold it up as a curiosity, but because we genuinely believed it had something to teach us. If the climate movement has failed to build a durable majority, part of the reason is that it has been built almost entirely on progressive foundations, in progressive language, for progressive audiences. These four people were doing something different, and we thought documentary film was exactly the right tool to show it.
We don’t pretend to be neutral. But we made a deliberate choice to step back, follow, and listen — because we suspected that what these conservatives had figured out about persuasion, about meeting people where they are, about the difference between being right and being effective, was more valuable than anything we could have scripted.
– Dominic and Nadia, Co-Founders
Encompass Films
