By Peter Keough

What have you done to prevent the end of the world? A quartet of documentaries in this year’s Global World Film Festival offer different answers to this nagging question.

The Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston. May 17-21 at the Capitol Theatre and online.

A scene from Planet B. Photo: Visions du Reel

Pieter Van Eecke’s Planet B (screens May 18 at 11 a.m. at the Capitol Theatre) opens with a montage of home movies in which Bo, a young Belgian girl, larks about at the beach and in a garden. The images are backed by increasingly ominous reports about the worsening state of the climate emergency. By the age of 13, Bo has heard enough and, along with her activist mother and her equally committed BFF Luca, and inspired maybe by the Swedish firebrand Greta Thunberg (who appears briefly in the film), she has joined a movement protesting the impending environmental catastrophe. “In 2050,” she says at one demonstration, “I will be 45 years old. In 2100 I will be 95. My life is only beginning.” But the world, as she sees it, is already ending.

To fight back she, her mother, and Luca participate in “actions,” demonstrations in which they block access to public ways, or camp out in forests to prevent polluting factories and other corporate entities from cutting down the trees to develop their projects, or glue themselves to the facades of banks investing in climate destructive companies. They are arrested, released, and plan another project. With painted faces and whimsically grim costumes the youngsters convey a determination and innocence (“It’s too hard to get capitalism down,” says Bo during a “brainstorming” session. “It will be too late before we get everyone with us to try to stop capitalism”) that they hope will make a difference.

Their biggest enemy is apathy and their own beleaguered commitment. Luca, who once chided Bo on her timidity in confronting the police, drops out for a while to deal with some of the personal problems endemic to adolescence. But Bo persists, and whether she and other young people like her succeed may be the last hope for our survival.

A scene from Murky Waters.

Once upon a time the plight of refugees fleeing war zones and disasters might have inspired an international movement of aid and goodwill. But instead, these days it has fired up right wing, xenophobic, and racist political movements around the world. But Mo Abassi, a Dane of Palestinian descent whose family had themselves been refugees from the 1979 civil war in Lebanon, responded differently. When he saw images of desperate Syrians fleeing the violence of their homeland — crossing the sea in fragile vessels for the dubious shelter of Europe — he felt compelled to help. He joined a humanitarian organization on the Greek island of Lesbos that helps the thousands of refugees who arrive there daily. But when he and a friend decide to break the rules and head out to sea to rescue those in a capsizing boat, they were charged with human trafficking by the Greek authorities – a crime for which they could be imprisoned for ten years.

His story unfolds in Martin B. Gulnov’s Murky Waters (screens May 18 at 12:30 p.m. at the Capitol Theatre) as he explains to his defense lawyer the circumstances behind his arrest. The case is murky indeed, involving bureaucratic laws that seem intended to discourage the human impulse to aid those in need. As Abassi’s lawyer puts it, he is taking the case “not only because it can have grave consequences for you, but also if they criminalize the concept of ‘love thy neighbor’ then our society will start dissolving.” Sadly, that dissolution has long been underway.

A scene from Sergio Ghizzardi’s Nenets Vs. Gas

For the indigenous Nenets people of the Yamal (the indigenous word for “end of the world”) peninsula in Siberia, the waters have been growing murky since geologists discovered the vast reserves of natural gas and petroleum that lay under the tundra where they herd their reindeer. Sergio Ghizzardi’s Nenets Vs. Gas (2023; available online May 17-21) makes the case for the Nenets right to exist, a reasonable plea which will make little headway against the greed and rapacity of the Russian oligarchs and the government officials who see them only as an obstacle to their accumulation of profit and power. Intermittently shown at a St. Petersburg conference, these honchos outline their plans to dominate the energy industry over the course of the century by ruthlessly exploiting the Arctic resources. Since they don’t give a shit about the future of the world, it seems unlikely they will make any concessions to a small tribe of hardy survivors even though they have inhabited the land for centuries.

Seeing how little success other citizens have had in defying the will of Russian imperialism, the Ninets have taken a gradualist approach to dealing with the authorities. They seek minor reforms rather than pit themselves recklessly against the juggernaut of noxious development. Nonetheless, their doom seems preordained, epitomized in images of reindeer struggling to cross landscapes cut by pipelines and helicopters taking their children away to boarding schools in cities far away.

Ghizzardi’s cinematography celebrates the stark beauty of the desolate vistas that are the Ninets’ homeland. Unfortunately, he also includes CGI sequences of the same, including animation of huge icebreakers opening up the Arctic. The artificiality of this strategy dissipates the impact of the actual imagery.

A scene from Grasshopper Republic.

The recurring images of swarming insects in Daniel McCabe’s Grasshopper Republic (screens May 18 at 2:15 p.m. at the Capitol Theatre) recall the Biblical plague of locusts. The dense, winged masses — eerily lit like a floating aurora borealis — are strikingly apocalyptic. But, as we see in the opening image of this documentary, bags of grasshoppers (actually bush crickets or Ruspolia differens) are worth handfuls of banknotes. The bugs are not so much an omen of the end times as a sign of prosperity for the Ugandan money-men who harvest the squirming bounty and sell them as delicacies.

Inspired by photographer Michele Sibiloni’s 2021 book Nsenene, McCabe’s many closeups of creepy-crawlies rival those in the 1996 documentary Microcosmos. After a while it seems like you can almost recognize individual chitinous faces. The end credits include a list of every species of insect, bird, mammal and other critters seen in the film. Though there is no disclaimer indicating that none were harmed during the making of the movie.

Shot over three years in verite style, the film records in painstaking detail the ordeal of setting up the traps, which requires jerry-rigged generators that power garish, greenish lights which lure the victims down corrugated steel slides into rusty drums. Downpours and mudslides threaten the process; at first, the grasshoppers seem a no-show. Instead, the workers are plagued by the Nairobi flies, which swarm over their faces while they sleep and exude a toxin that, when crushed, cause hideous rashes. The bright lighting also takes its toll, damaging eyes and blighting the surrounding crops, compelling the entrepreneurs to buy off the land at bargain prices. In the end, it’s not the grasshoppers who pose doomsday threat, but the capitalist system that monetizes them, exploiting the workers and despoiling the land in order to make a quick buck at the expense of the common good.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).