Imagine the World is Ending
2016 · 3m · New Zealand
Directed by Brendan Withy
Genres: coming-of-age, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Two schoolboys perform their blistering spoken-word poem about the world their generation is inheriting.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's teenagers doing spoken word about climate anxiety—exactly the kind of worthy-feeling content that makes most people's eyes glaze over—but there's something genuinely unsettling about watching kids articulate the end of the world with such precision that it stops being performance and starts being testimony.
The film situates itself squarely in the essay-film tradition, though the decision to center unadorned adolescent voices rather than authorial narration creates an interesting tension with the lineage it's inheriting from structural documentary.
The entire film hinges on the choice to let the camera hold steady on the boys' faces while their words escalate—no cut-aways, no visual flourishes—which transforms three minutes of spoken word into something that feels like an endurance test, and it works precisely because of that restraint.