Recent revelations show that the fossil fuel industries, over the course of many decades, sponsored scientific research about the potential consequences of burning fossil fuels on the earth’s environment, which concluded that the impact would be “dramatic” and “urgent.” Instead of sharing this information and seeking alternatives, the fossil fuels industries embarked on a longstanding campaign of disinformation and obfuscation that has outdone that of big tobacco (see, for instance, this Guardian article from 2021 —https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment).Now that all this has come to light, the result is an unprecedented rash of lawsuits and investigations. These legal proceedings are expected to take years, but right now we need to be informed about what is at stake. Our short film, “We’ve Been Bamboozled,” which combines images of a world powered by fossil fuels with a poetic summary, based on text extracted from the oil industry’s own reports, is part of that effort. We freely admit that our poem takes liberties with the original texts, ironically paring down their prose using an erasure strategy, to reveal and highlight that the fossil fuel industries knew how much they were contributing to climate change, how dangerous that was, and just how long they chose to keep that information to themselves (since at least 1959).

From images drawn from 125 years of cinema and left to speak for themselves, a new memory emerges that shows us our ambiguous, deep but often violent relationship with animals. Through this closeness, the film has us rediscover our own related destinies.