“I want to be left alone” said the Swedish cinema celebrity, Greta Garbo.

Contemporary Swedish climate crusading celebrity, Greta Thunberg would rather be left alone, too, but she is compelled to speak out about the coming catastrophe she sees stemming from human manufactured climate change.

Such commitment and courage attracts attention, creates celebrity, and the documentary film, I AM GRETA, gives us an up close and personal view of this tenacious teenager.

Swedish director Nathan Grossman starts his film with Greta’s one person school strike for climate action outside the Swedish Parliament. It’s telling that the footpath she occupies is littered with cigarette butts, illustrative of people’s lack of care to their environment. If they can’t bin their refuse then no wonder they refuse to act on bigger, global environmental issues.

Grossman follows Greta—a shy student with Asperger’s—in her rise to prominence and her galvanizing global impact as she sparks school strikes around the world. The film culminates with her extraordinary wind-powered
voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City.

Greta is like a present day Raoul Nordling, the Swedish diplomat whose stand and actions halted the Nazi’s planned demolition of Paris. Nordling stopped Paris burning and Greta advocates to stop the globe burning.

There’s a haunting image of Greta looking out at the coalmine that ate Hambacher Forest in Germany. The deathly desolation is redolent of Nazi concentration camps and the juxtaposition of chimneys belching out carbon emissions only adds to the idea of Holocaust.

As the title suggests, I AM GRETA is more about Greta than climate change. During the course of the film she develops a lot over the year, honing her honest and authentic style of saying what she thinks and passionately pointing at problems ignored by politicians.

With her Asperger’s diagnosis and blunt way of expressing herself, Greta becomes an icon, a beacon for affirmative action.

Through its iconic subject, I AM GRETA highlights the growing gap between worsening climate impacts and warnings from scientists on the one hand, and the words and actions of world leaders on the other.
Greta and other young people demand a safe future and that leaders listen to the science – instead they are met with empty words from politicians, and ridicule or even death threats from individuals.

Berating Greta with bombast, fossil fools, should, instead, be applauding a teenager from getting off her arse and caring about something.