Ecologist Terry Spahr Turns to Kickstarter For His First Feature film, 8 Billion Angels, a Documentary About Overpopulation
Independent filmmaker Terry Spahr is turning to the Internet to raise funds for his provocative feature film project, 8 Billion Angels, a documentary about overpopulation and its effect on the environment. With funding as a major obstacle to getting any film completed, Spahr hopes to raise post-production funds by leveraging Kickstarter’s growing number of project backers and the public’s growing appetite for environmental films.
Filmmakers have to become more innovative in their fundraising tactics, and the independent filmmaking community has embraced sites like Kickstarter.com. According to the crowdfunding site’s guidelines, artists have a set number of days to raise all the funds, or the project receives nothing. Spahr’s film has a 30-day fundraising window, from start to finish. If the allotted budget ($34,000 US) isn’t raised before June 30, all pledges are cancelled and the film will not be funded.
When asked about why Kickstarter was appealing, Spahr noted, “the ability to tell our story quickly online to a lot of people who might not otherwise know about it is invaluable.” Spahr’s film, 8 Billion Angels, examines what it calls the upstream cause of all of our environmental emergencies – overpopulation. The film uses interview portraits of citizens from around the world to tell a universal story about the greatest threat to the future of our planet. Reflecting a wide range of human emotion and experience, the film seeks to reveal a larger more complex portrait of our shared humanity.
“Experts agree that the size of the human ‘footprint’ is a serious problem and it has only been increasing. It makes sense then that, in addition to reducing the footprint per person, we must also address the issue of population management,” said Spahr.
Spahr says the explosive growth in the human population and the resulting effects on the environment have been largely ignored by many of those concerned with climate change. “It is ‘a bombshell of a topic,’ with profound and controversial issues of ethics, morality, and social justice,” he says.
“Overpopulation is seen as the ‘third rail’ of the sustainability debate – being a subject considered by many in the environmental community and among politicians to be too controversial to discuss.”
Spahr said it became politically incorrect to discuss population management in the 1970’s, when China and India instituted inappropriate coercive measures to manage their rising numbers and many large “green” organizations like The Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and Wilderness Society removed these platforms from their organizations. Since then, while the subject has largely been ignored and global population has skyrocketed, research has revealed that the world population would need to be reduced by more than two-thirds for people on the planet to live sustainably and enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of Europeans.
8 Billion Angels was shot on location in Tokyo and the Shikine-Jima Islands off Japan, in the Delhi and Kerala regions of India, across the Great Plains of Kansas and Nebraska and near and around Acadia National Park in Maine. If the campaign is successfully funded, Spahr expects to deliver the final cut before the end of 2018.
About 8 Billion Angels
8 Billion Angels is a documentary feature that exposes our world’s water, food, climate and extinction emergencies as a direct consequence of attempting to support our unsustainable population. The film examines the evidence pointing towards a controversial and often overlooked question: are there too many people on Planet Earth? And consequently, are we and all Earth’s creatures destined for extinction, or do we have the will to turn the tide? To find out more about 8 Billion Angels, visit online at www.8billionangels.org , on Twitter @8BillionAngels or on Facebook @8billionAngels
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