On November 30, Scandinavia House presents a screening of the defiant, propulsive climate documentary Just Look Up, a Danish qualifier for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.
Having lived through decades of stagnant government response to sedate climate change protests, Climate Defiance and founder/executive director Michael Greenberg pivot toward a different tack. This organization of young activists weasels their way into business conferences and crashes public and private events in order to nonviolently — but often wildly confrontationally — denounce the fossil fuel CEOs and politicians under the industry’s influence. Taking cues from the shock civil disobedience strategies of prior direct-action movements, they aim to make these contentious and viral engagements impossible for today’s media ecosystem to ignore.
Directors Emma Wall and Betsy Hershey follow Greenberg and his fellow activists in their actions, their crises, and their breakthroughs. They share a desperation over the apathetic attitude toward the climate, but that does not mean they agree on everything. With their non-violent actions, they shake society awake and create viral waves on social media. And in Just Look Up, this is fuelled musically by the likes of Chappell Roan, Doechii and Billie Eilish – voices that, like Greenberg himself, speak on behalf of a generation that wants change now.
Betsy Hershey is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and musician whose work moves between storytelling and song. In her documentary work she has explored Indigenous maternal health in Mexico, migration in the United States, and the Mind & Life Institute’s ongoing dialogues with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. Hershey co-directed the documentary Guerrilla Habeas, which premiered at Telluride in 2022 and later aired as part of Trevor Noah’s The Turning Point on MSNBC. As the musician BETS, she has released three albums and toured across North America and Europe. Hershey frequently combines her love of film and music. She executive produced PAVEMENTS, an experimental music documentary which premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. She has also created video art with her music that aims to encourage voting, highlight prisoners of conscience, and confront the realities of climate change. In the spirit of Joan Baez, she treats art as a form of action, holding fast to her words that action is the antidote to despair.
Emma Wall is a Danish-American filmmaker and child psychiatrist whose work searches for the human center inside overwhelming systems. She studied psychology at Brown University and medicine at Oxford, graduating with honors, then completed psychiatric training at Columbia and Cornell. Her early career took her from the Los Angeles foster care system to refugee camps in Greece and India, to hospitals in Kyrgyzstan and South Africa. Those years taught her how fragile and how resilient people can be. As global crises deepened, Emma turned to filmmaking as a way to respond. Documentary became a tool not only to observe but to intervene, offering new ways to engage with the urgent and complex challenges shaping our time. Her work confronts issues at the intersection of mental health and human rights, from forced displacement to climate collapse. She is drawn to subjects who find meaning inside chaos and who refuse to give up on hope. Her debut documentary short, Guerrilla Habeas, co-directed with Betsy Hershey, premiered at Telluride and became part of Trevor Noah’s series The Turning Point on MSNBC. She divides her time between Copenhagen and New York.
Photos: © Guest House Productions