THE 11TH H0UR

Leonardo DiCaprio is a rare phenomenon. He's certainly not the only celebrity trying to raise awareness of environmental issues. But whereas for so many celebrities, charity work is an add-on, an obligatory social tax they feel they must pay to justify public admiration, for DiCaprio it is a thread that runs through everything he does. He's championed some of America's most effective environmental organisations, such as the Natural Resources Defence Council and Global Green and has led calls for the expulsion of oil money from US politics. His new film The llth Hour is a very personal project where the two parts of his life merge. Hot on the heels of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, The llth Hour is very much the sequel and to be amongst the first to view it even before it debuted at Cannes was a privilege. "I expected something impressive. I expected something profound and depressing--a catalogue of human errors and a stark warning, said a viewer of the movie." But the llth Hour takes the debate about the environment to a whole new level. It places the problems we're now mostly aware of in the context of something bigger, describing climate change, oceanic dead zones, soil erosion, the destruction of the world's forests and the spread of disease in the context of system failure. It is shockingly ambitious, and it works.