That’s the promise of Demain (Tomorrow, in English), French filmmaker Cyril Dion’s 2015 eco-documentary, which wasn’t released in the U.S. until this spring. In the past two years, it’s racked up more than $8 million in domestic box office, been seen by a million people in France — most documentaries don’t top 50,000 — and won multiple awards, including a César (the French Oscar) for Best Documentary. Dion, who directed the film alongside actress Mélanie Laurent, wasn’t expecting a rise quite this sudden or meteoric — but he knows just what to do with the opportunity he’s been given.

Dion, 39, had been an activist for years, and in 2007 he’d had enough of seeing money and time and energy go toward trying to convince people that climate change is a looming, catastrophic problem. “I had this kind of enlightenment moment where I just thought what we need to do is show what it would look like if we could make things right,” he tells OZY. “We keep asking people: ‘Quit using your car, taking baths, eating meat, taking planes.’ But we never tell them: If you quit everything, we could live this way, and maybe it could be even better.” Demain showcases projects from across the world — urban farms, Finnish education initiatives, composting — for the most part undertaken by ordinary people who decided in small ways to fix their corner of the world.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.ozy.com