This special screening, part of Planting Seeds, the Garden Cinema's environmental film strand, marks Earth Day 2026, the UN-backed global event occurring every 22nd April since 1970, to profile ecological campaigning.

And it is another UN environmental structure, one that is now deeply problematic, that comes under close scrutiny in Josh Appignanesi's remarkable documentary essay film Colossal Wreck. Taking its title from Ozymandias, Shelley's famous sonnet on imperial hubris, Colossal Wreck plunges us deep into the chaos of contradictions that is COP28, the 2023 UN climate change conference in oil-producing Dubai. Invited to show his earlier film My Extinction, about climate protest, in a fringe pavilion, Appignanesi moves from official gatherings to absurd immersive installations to well-meaning activist rallies and the lived frontline of unarguable indigenous witness. All of this takes place in one of the most jarring cityscapes on the planet, "narcotically Ballardian and surreal... an uncanny valley of hyper-prosperous consumerist placidity... a city-state-sized airport duty free shop crossed with a Kubrickian spaceship" (The Guardian).

Superbly shot and written, evocatively scored by Vik Sharma, Colossal Wreck is a singular, urgent and honest dispatch from the hypocrisy-fuelled frontline of an increasingly precarious future, a film of "mesmerizing energy... as if Schopenhauer had made Blade Runner" (The TLS).

Introducing Colossal Wreck, and discussing it afterwards with host Gareth Evans, will be the film-maker Josh Appignanesi.