Project Paradise

Project Paradise takes as its starting point the Black and White Oil conference organised by Richard Demarco at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974 at which Joseph Beuys and Buckminster Fuller both spoke. The conference took place in the context of the imminent extraction of oil and natural gas in the North Sea and posed a number of questions frighteningly relevant now as, fifty years later, we try to find ways to shift the conversation on climate change, mitigate its ravishes and keep fossil fuels underground.

The film examines myths of Paradise as a way of talking about how we look at nature as something simply to commodify. It argues that our current panic about natural resources is about the end of an era rather than the end of the planet and uses the film as a space to open thought about how we might want to live in the future.

Director: Sarah Wood. UK, 21 mins, 2023, video