An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) is Davis Guggenheim's documentary, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It is built around the traveling slideshow on a warming climate that former U.S. vice president Al Gore delivered to rooms full of people across the globe.

The camera rarely leaves Gore and his slides: charts of rising carbon dioxide, before-and-after shots of shrinking glaciers, photographs of lakes that have since vanished from the map. Between the graphs he gets personal, talking about a son who nearly died in childhood and a sister lost to cancer, so the numbers stop feeling like abstractions. The result is less a dry briefing than a portrait of a man who spent three decades trying to get politicians to listen and is now speaking straight to the viewer. At times it plays as a warning, at times as a quiet reproach aimed at himself.

The film picked up two Oscars, one for documentary feature and one for Melissa Etheridge's song, and a year later Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Some of its forecasts read differently now than they did in 2006, which makes it worth watching as a record of its moment. Best for anyone curious about where the mainstream climate conversation began, and unbothered by a film carried by a single lecture. Stream An Inconvenient Truth (2006) online on iFILM.