Manu Riche is making an autobiographical film about his grandfather, his father and himself, in which the past of fossil fuels is the common denominator. Manu Riche’s grandfather was a coal engineer, and his father was a petroleum dealer. He is, as a filmmaker, the latest derivative of that generation.
But how did this film project bring me to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis?
James Lovelock is a 102-year-old chemist and engineer. He is the inventor of Gaia: the earth itself is a living organism. He was the first to speak of the ‘Anthropocene Era’.
Lynn Margulis was a microbiologist, she died in 2011. She was able to prove to James Lovelock and eventually to the entire scientific world that it is precisely the cooperation of the various organisms on earth that gives LIFE. Without life, and therefore without cooperation between micro-organisms and organisms in general, there can be no living earth and therefore no stable atmosphere through which something like mankind could arise and exist.
The film Charbon is a journey through the future of the last century. A century that was characterised by wars that spawned even more wars. The engines of those wars were coal and petroleum, the sources of energy that caused the acceleration of the future.
A conversation with Manu Riche, Hayder Helo and Edoardo Ripani.