Curb Your Carbon Nominated for Canadian Screen Award in Strong Science and Nature Category

The genre-bending and irreverent documentary, Curb Your Carbon, was nominated this week for the prestigious Rob Stewart Award for Best Science or Nature Documentary Program or Series.

Named for renowned filmmaker Rob Stewart, whose documentaries Sharkwater and Revolution focused our attention on the destruction of the natural world, this year the best science and nature category is dominated by films about the environment.

But Curb Your Carbon isn’t a typical climate change doc. It uses humour, stunts and unexpected animations to focus on the easy and everyday steps we can all take right now to cut billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide.

“We’re honoured to be nominated,” says producer Dugald Maudsley. “We weren’t sure how the Academy would react to science documentary that uses many of the tools of factual television to grab people’s attention. We couldn’t have asked for a better response.”

When Maudsley and his research team, Monika Delmos and Marion Gruner, began digging into the world of climate change, they were stunned by the impact concerted action could have.

For example, they discovered that every single day Canadian families waste the equivalent of one million cups of milk, 750,000 loaves of bread, and half a million bananas. In a year, Canadians throw away 2.2 billion kilograms of perfectly good and totally edible food. Producing that food creates C02 — tonnes of it. In fact, worldwide, if food waste were its own country it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the United States.

To tell this story director P.J. Naworynski and writer Liam O’Rinn decided to dress up a Guelph, Ontario family as Ninjas, get them to steal their neighbours’ garbage and dig through it to find the wasted edible food. They also convinced a New Zealand rugby team to take on a culinary double dare to illustrate how meat creates 7 billion tonnes of C02 a year. And they brought in a bug exterminator to eat crickets, grasshoppers, and scorpions to reveal how insects could replace meat as a viable and climate-friendly source of protein.

“Curb Your Carbon may be irreverent, but it also provides a clear blueprint for fighting climate change,” says Naworynski. “Working together we have the power to cut C02 emissions, give our planet a break and save ourselves in the bargain.”

The formula seems to be working. This summer Curb Your Carbon won the Homeland Earth Award at the Silbersalz Science and Media Festival. It was also nominated for the Most Innovative Program/Project of the Year Award at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers where it lost to a documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

“The Silbersalz jury had really some great remarks on the production,” said Irem Couchouron head of programs at the festival. “The whole idea is to promote creative science storytelling on all mediums, to incubate new ways of communicating science through art, through cinema and through ideas exchange. The judges felt Curb Your Carbon did that.”

“We loved making this documentary,” says co-producer Gillian Main. “We plan to make more about the environment in the hope that they’ll change the way people think about our world and what we’re leaving behind for our children.”

The Canadian Screen Awards for documentary will be handed out a gala at Meridian Hall on 11 April.

Curb Your Carbon is distributed by Off the Fence - https://www.offthefence.com/Home

It is produced in Association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and with the participation of The Canadian Media Fund, Rogers Documentary Fund, Rogers Telefund, CAVCO and Ontario Creates.