We're All Going To Die
A mostly amusing documentary film by Ben Knight
What’s the film about, then?
Ben is a journalist afflicted by the encroaching crises he writes about. He travels from Berlin to London to Kansas to Norway, and then to the centre of all loss, the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, learning from those preparing for social and ecological collapse. Call them preppers, doomers, or bunker-dwellers, the collapse community turns out to be bigger than he thinks.
“Ben takes us by the hand and leads us into the rabbit holes of apocalypse.”
– Michael Shaw, film-maker, Living In The Time Of Dying
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Two special screenings in Berlin Summer 2023:
June 14: Exclusive screening with director and crew at Moviemento Kino, Kreuzberg.
August 1: Double feature with a screening of We’re All Going To Die, introduced by a talk from Deep Adaptation founder and prominent doomster Jem Bendell at Kino Central, Mitte.
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Praise for We’re All Going To Die
“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.”
– Johann Hari, bestselling author of Stolen Focus and Chasing the Scream
“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.”
– Papillon, artist, musician, environmental scientist
“Years in the making, this film’s release is perfectly timed between covid trauma and nuclear holocaust.”
– Jem Bendell, author of Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy
From the director
I live in Europe. About a decade ago, the financial system here nearly collapsed, and it was scarier than we thought it was. Though we didn’t notice at the time, there was a day when the banks told the governments they were going to turn off the cash machines.
Around that time, the word crisis changed its meaning. It used to be one event, a cataclysm that brings relief or death. Then a new meaning arose: Crisis became an ongoing state of anxiety, a sense that everything is going more and more wrong.
Over the last ten years, the crises have been accumulating, encroaching on us, eating away like an acid at the carapace of daily life that protects us from chaos.
At some point, tired and broken-hearted, the carapace had grown too thin. So I went out to prepare, and to learn from those already doing so.
Ben Knight
From the producer
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.
Maurice Frank
