I Am Greta Review

A movement to combat climate change that shocked the world started with a single protest by a 15-year-old Greta Thunberg stood outside the Swedish parliament, holding a hand-made banner that read "School strikes For Climate". One of the people who captured those first demonstrations, documentary filmmaker Nathan Grossman, who heard about the protest by an Thunberg friend from the family. In the following months, nothing would have been able to prepare Grossman or Thunberg for the media frenzies that followed as the filmmaker continued to record each step of her trip. According to what Thunberg describes in her film "It's as if you're in the middle of a dream. It's a dream that is very surreal."

The images that show Thunberg in the front of protesters as he holds world leaders to account are inspiring.

Grossman adeptly captures the rapid speed that Thunberg rises from a single protester to the voice of a worldwide movement. Incredibly tender videos of Thunberg giving emotional speeches at home is juxtaposed with pictures of the massive Friday school strikes her words have inspired. In other scenes, powerful live-streamed footage of environmental catastrophes are chilling the viewer, particularly when Grossman overlays them over the voices of those who are denigrating and mocking Thunberg as well as US president Donald Trump. The scenes of Thunberg organizing protesters, challenging climate change denialists and holding the world's most powerful figures to account are inspiring as is witnessing her unwavering determination to bring about changes.

However, when Grossman is following Thunberg in her epic journey through the Atlantic to address the United Nations' Climate Summit in New York the strain on her shoulders is evident. "I would rather not have to go through all the above," she sobs, crying. Like the Davis Guggenheim film He Named Me Malala, these scenes blur the boundary between intrusion and accessibility and often leave difficult safeguarding questions.

However, it's mostly a single-sided picture of Thunberg with very little to no secondary voices. Sometimes, it appears like you're scrolling through an extensive social media account and not understanding the core of the things that make Thunberg an important person.