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Ben, afflicted by the all-encompassing crises he is condemned to write about for a living, travels from Berlin to Kansas to Norway and finally the centre of all loss, the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, to learn from those preparing for social and ecological collapse. Call them preppers, climate doomers, or bunker-dwellers, the collapse community turns out to be bigger than anyone thinks.
“Ben takes us by the hand and leads us into the rabbit holes of apocalypse.”
Berlin Independent Film Festival (Germany)
BELIFF International Film Fest London (UK)
Elevate Festival (Austria)
Lakeside Festival (Germany)
Futurologic Symposium (Netherlands)
Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht (Germany)
Berlin Lift-Off Film Festival (Germany)
Kosice International Film Festival (Slovakia)
“Ich habe alles an diesem Film geliebt. Die Melancholie, den Humor, die leise Verzweiflung, die Albernheit unserer Spezies – und wie es Ben Knight gelingt, die Ratlosigkeit vieler in unserer absurden Zeit zu etwas Positiven, Unterhaltsamen zu verdichten.”
“Ben Knight is a brilliant film-maker and anyone who wants to figure out how to think about the fate of humanity should watch his excellent film.”
“Years in the making, this film’s release is perfectly timed between Covid trauma and nuclear holocaust.”
“Ben takes us by the hand and leads us into some of the rabbit holes of apocalypse. Travelling far inside himself and across the globe he finds an impressive array of perspectives and interviews to bring to a very difficult subject. Beautifully filmed, with a wonderful sound-score, this film is unexpectedly funny, touching and troubling all at once. He managed to mix his own self-revealing humour to the profound questions arising for many of us at this time.”
“This film taps into a deep concern that many in contemporary society sense but perhaps dare not yet speak. Knight masterfully uses his own distinct style of dry humour to take viewers on a journey across the globe, meeting some of the strangest people and ideas out there in the realm of the ‘collapse aware’. Despite the heavy subtext the film doesn’t preach or seek to convince, rather it simply invites viewers to lean into their existential anxiety and hear what it may be saying to them. A great film worthy of a wide audience.”
If you have eyes and ears and an internet connection, it is difficult to ignore the hollow sense of dread widening in your stomach. The anxiety this creates is a kind of acid, eating away at the carapace of daily life that keeps your sense of normality in place. This film is about those for whom the carapace is no longer thick enough, those who have decided to act against the all-encompassing dread. When I began the work, I thought this would make for an amusing subject for a film, but soon enough I realized that not only were these people’s fears rational, I shared many of them myself. So the film has become about my own confrontation with the world’s mortality. This film is not a conventional documentary. The scenes are not interviews, but conversations with those who feel what I feel, and often felt it long before I did.
Reading Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature as a teen, I became a doomer early in life. I learned how we had fucked up the chemistry of every corner of the world with the byproducts of our industrial civilisation. From Everest to the Mariana Trench and everywhere in between, we were systematically turning this orb into a dead, uninhabitable lump of rock. Thirty years on, the worst dystopian forecasters were proven correct: animal and plant diversity is still being extinguished at a stunning rate, while human life has become crushingly artificial and false, as well as materially and/or spiritually impoverished. Intractable hyper-problems all point in one direction: the end. And the list goes on: obscene oligarchal wealth, apocalyptic levels of inequality, out-of-control AI-led tech corps, Donald Trump and co., resurgent racism, mass idiocracy, the refugee crisis, climate tipping points wherever you look. Things are not looking so hot. When Ben told me about We’re All Going To Die, the project immediately spoke to me. Ben was feeling what I was feeling – but instead of stewing in self-pity and frustration about near-future collapse, he let his dread lead him down the rabbit hole of collapse preparation, caused him to engage with the “end of the world” by engaging with people who have made it their mission to prep physically, emotionally and spiritually for the coming end times. Working with his fabulous crew – Lea, Ingo, Amit – Ben did what he set out to do: confront our private and collective fears and emerge at the end of this film journey a changed, bigger and less fearful person. We can’t halt the end of the world, we can’t halt the end of ourselves – only the way we live with that knowledge.
A mostly amusing newsletter on facing the prospect of civilisational collapse.
