2022, the coincidence year when reality catches up with fiction. Soylent Green is the 1st sci-fi movie about a New York dystopia that disturbingly mirrors our daily life: climate change, overpopulation, water scarcity, drifting commodity prices, food crises...
Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer, is a monument of social science fiction. Released in 1973, it is the first science-fiction film that doesn't evoke an exogenous threat (such as a Martian attack, a nuclear war...), but a climate and environmental disaster for which man alone is responsible. Soylent Green marks the very beginning of the awareness of the ecological emergency which, fifty years later, is only just beginning to take hold in people's minds.
This documentary tells the story of the making of this iconic film, setting it in its historical and political context, while exploring its many troubling contemporary resonances. For in many respects, Richard Fleischer had hit the nail on the head: climate change, global overpopulation, water scarcity, raw material price drift, food crises. A few months ago, an article published by the leading magazine Bioscience raised a red flag. Signed by 15,000 international scientists, the text states that the earth's ecosystem is so degraded that "the very fabric of human life is now being challenged".