Our Year Without Oil (Recipes for Disaster)

Tues 1 July 2008 10pm
A documentary following a family as they embark on a oil detox, and try to lives their lives without using fossil fuels.

Director's statement: John Webster

"Billy Wilder once said, "If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you".

When I began making this film in the spring of 2005 I knew that climate change, for most people, was a subject too awful to think about. If they were going to sit through the film I would make, they had to be given a few laughs.

Eventually I decided to focus the film on why it is so hard for people to change, even when we know we have to. I put myself and my family as the central characters in the film – we would change, we would go on an oil diet.

What I hadn't expected, was that for much of the laughs in the film, I would be the butt of the joke – I, the mono-focused male. Inadvertantly, I had made a film about the relationship between a man and a woman, about those little power struggles that tug and pull within the family, and about balancing security with change, ideals with practicalities.

I hope that Our Year Without Oil is a thought provoking, entertaining and hopefully also inspiring film about climate change, and what it can mean for every family."

About the film

Few of us dispute that global warming is a real threat. Few of us dispute either that our own individual fossil fuel consumption contributes to this danger. But – as filmmaker John Webster points out at the beginning of this enjoyably challenging documentary – not many of us are prepared to change our lives significantly enough to really do something about it.

What would you give up?

Would you, for instance, be prepared to give up flying? Give up your car? Give up plastic? That's the challenge that Webster set himself and his family for one year. He made them undergo a one year oil detox. Filming their (increasingly slow) progress throughout. The results are funny, poignant, frequently bizarre, and ultimately very enlightening.

The essential point Webster makes about his fossil fuel free diet is that it does not mean "growing a beard, taking to wearing old woolly jumpers and moving into a cottage to grow organic turnips." He, his wife and two young boys continue to lead their average suburban lives in Finland – still going to work, still keeping up payments on the bank loan, still going on holiday.