At the second film event as part of the VISIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY climate protection series, a survey was carried out on the reception of Jennifer Abbott’s documentary The Magnitude Of All Things. Here we present the first results from the questionnaires.
I. THE FILM
Jennifer Abbott | 2020 | Canada | 86 min | OmU (eng)
The Magnitude Of All Things explores the concept of climate grief—the grief over the loss of the animals, landscapes, and ecosystems devastated by climate change—by connecting Abbott’s emotional response to her sister’s death from cancer with her emotional responses to climate change. Stories from the front lines of climate change merge with memories of the filmmaker’s childhood in Ontario. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is: everything.
II. DATA COLLECTION
The Magnitude of All Things was shown on November 19th, 2024 at the Harmonie Kino Freiburg. Around 100 spectators had the choice between an online and a paper questionnaire. In addition to attitudes towards climate protection, emotional reactions to the film were also measured.
The questionnaire consisted of three parts: The first part was completed shortly before the film screening, the second part was answered immediately after the film. The third part followed a subsequent panel discussion with the psychologist and psychotherapist Verena Heidenreich.
III. THE FIRST RESEARCH RESULTS
Here is an insight into the first, descriptive evaluation of the questionnaire: The so-called “n” stands for the number of people who answered the question. An “n=70” means that 70 viewers submitted an answer.
What was particularly of interest to us in relation to this film was viewers’ emotional reactions to it. As Figure 1 shows, the vast majority (84.3%) of respondents said the documentary made them feel “compassionate.” The second most commonly cited emotion was “grief” (75.7%) – a central theme of the documentary in both human relationships and climate change – followed by a feeling of “connectedness” (74.3%). Almost half of the participants reported feeling “powerless” (47.1%) and 41.4% said they felt “anger”.
In this survey, the emotion of grief was also the focus of the attitudes that were measured before and immediately after the film. As can be seen in Figure 2, agreement with the statement “Grief is an appropriate response to the effects of the climate crisis” increased slightly after the film screening.
Also very interesting is the agreement with the statement: “Grief as a reaction to the climate crisis paralyzes the ability to act” (Figure 3). While a total of 43.1% of viewers “disagreed” or “rather disagreed”” before watching the film, this combined value increased significantly after the film screening to a total of over 70%. This suggests that after watching the film, many of our viewers viewed grief in response to the climate crisis as less paralyzing.
The agreement with the statement “Coping with grief is a first step towards meaningful action for climate protection” is also revealing, as the connection between coping with grief and meaningful action is explicitly addressed in the film. As Figure 4 shows, a shift towards agreement with this statement was observed among our viewers. While 27.6% agreed before the film screening, 44.8% of viewers agreed after seeing the film.
Whether The Magnitude of All Things also encouraged people to do (even) more for climate protection was answered in the affirmative by the majority of our viewers (78.5%), thus showing a clear result, as can be seen in Figure 5.
Particularly important in connection with our research questions were the answers from our viewers to the question of whether the subsequent discussion with the psychologist and psychotherapist Verena Heidenreich had added value for them. Figure 6 shows that 86.9% said this was the case. This result supports the assumption that offering documentaries on sustainability topics not as an isolated event, but in combination with a subsequent discussion with experts, can add a meaningful dimension to the film viewing experience.
IV. CONCLUSION
In summary, the first evaluation showed that viewers were deeply emotionally moved by Jennifer Abbott’s The Magnitude of All Things and that the film primarily triggered compassion, grief, and a feeling of connectedness. It also influenced attitudes about the relationship between grief, coping with grief and the ability to act for climate protection. Overall, after the film, grief was viewed as a more appropriate and less debilitating emotional response to climate change, and coping with grief was seen as playing an even greater role as a first step toward meaningful action for greater climate protection.
We thank everyone who took part in our survey!
The next step involves an in-depth evaluation of the data collected and the addition of a context analysis. Stay tuned!
VISIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY is an inter- and transdisciplinary research project funded by the Innovation Sustainability Campus (ICN), located at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Non-university cooperation partners include Harmonie Kino, the Volkshochschule Freiburg and Greenmotions. The Freiburg environmental mayor Christine Buchheit has take on the patronage of the project.