Film maker Damon Gameau is creating change across the world through authentic story-telling.
In 2011, actor Damon Gameau made a very silly short film called Animal Beatbox. In the film, crude cut-outs of random animals, from dogs and cats to axolotls and racoons, are layered onto each other to a soundtrack of rapped animal names. The whole thing cost $80 to make.
Gameau’s friends insisted he enter it into the short film competition Tropfest Australia, but he wasn’t keen – he was embarrassed about how silly it was. But it won.
When Gameau saw live audiences cheering, laughing and clapping for the film, he had a “visceral reaction”. “I thought, ‘Maybe people do want to hear what I have to say’,” he says. The experience led Gameau to make That Sugar Film. Released in 2014, That Sugar Film is the highest grossing Australian documentary shown in cinemas across Australia and New Zealand. It documents Gameau’s mood swings and weight gain after going on a low-fat, high-sugar diet for 60 days.
Championed by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, the film became a key part of a movement for change in the UK (and later in France, New Zealand and Australia) that saw the introduction of a sugar tax and the removal of sugary foods from school canteens and hospitals. More than 1.5 million students were taught a curriculum based on the film, and more than $4 million was raised to help communities escape the ‘sugar trap’.
Gameau followed the success of That Sugar Film with the 2019 release of 2040, a film that explores what the future could look like if we embraced and implemented viable solutions to climate change. The film has been seen by more than 10 million people across cinemas, community screenings and television screens around the world and has reached 70 million people via social media. More than 50 Q+A sessions were held in Australia alone.
The movie helped to raise around $4 million, to establish new ecological solutions. “Children were giving their $5 lunch money and philanthropists were giving large sums,” says Gameau. “We raised $600,000 in 24 hours to set up a microgrid electricity system in Australia.”
His film Regenerating Australia – a partnership with World Wildlife Fund that was based on interviewing 100 Australians from different political and socio economic backgrounds – was taken to 60 towns and funding was made available to them if an ecological solution to a local challenge resonated with them. Twenty-five communities have since been given funding for a wide range of projects, such as collecting ash from coal mines and turning it into building materials and using sea urchins to provide a natural fertiliser for farms.
For Gameau, it was a powerful example of how communicating with people through film can have far-reaching positive impacts. “The role of the storyteller has never been more important,” he says. “The survival of humanity depends on us telling a new story.”
Influencing change
The power of storytelling became clear to Gameau in his acting career. “I was working with director Rolf de Heer and fellow actor David Gulpilil on the 2002 film, The Tracker, and later on Balibo – a 2009 film about five journalists who were killed in East Timor – and saw how provocative stories could be and what an agent of change they could be,” he says. “But I felt frustrated with acting – I was telling other people’s stories and didn’t always agree with the values that were being shown.”
Gameau began wrestling with how to engage audiences in narratives that could create change. “Big, existential questions need something tangible and personal to hang on,” he says. “How do you humanise and personalise a journey for someone? Your editing has to change, the level of humour, the pace has to be different.”
Al Gore’s hugely successful 2006 climate change film An Inconvenient Truth set a benchmark for documentaries that wake people up to the ecological disasters of climate change, says Gameau. But ten years later, he hadn’t seen any progression in storytelling. “When you keep telling people how bad it is and how it isn’t getting any better, our brains are not geared for that, they just shut down,” says Gameau. “So, how about we show people a better life – what’s on the other side of this crisis? What is the world that we aspire to create?”
Gameau’s focus for his own films is telling personalised stories. In a way, 2040 is the story of him wishing for a better world for his young daughter. “Graphs and statistics don’t really move people; stories move people,” he says. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned that people want to cling onto a narrative, even if it was bat-shit crazy.”
Future focus
The key to engaging audiences is to avoid being too “earnest” or “preachy”, says Gameau. Instead, content creators should show their own faults and weaknesses. “People are craving authenticity,” he says. “Do some self-deprecating early, so that people don’t think you’ve got it all together and you’re going to preach at them. In That Sugar Film, I put in a shot of me as a kid with these overgrown teeth, and that’s my way of showing I don’t think I’m better than anyone else – this is just me and my story, my interpretation.”
TikTok and other social media platforms may have highlighted how addictive short, sharp content is, but there’s still great value in a 1.5-hour documentary, says Gameau. “Look at the explosion of podcasts – we are actually craving length and depth. It’s like eating junk food – you can go for so long on the snacks and the dopamine hit, but eventually you crave a full meal of decent food.”
Gameau is now starting to work on his next film. “I’ve pitched it as School of Rock meets An Inconvenient Truth,” he says.
Eight school children from around the world will accompany Gameau on a biofuel bus tour through Europe, where they will visit projects that are developing exciting environmental solutions. “The literacy and eloquence that the children have about some of this stuff – it’s not perfect, but one of the most important things we can do is listen,” he says.
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Story by Ken Eastwood
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