A DOCUMENTARY on teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, making its premiere Friday at the Venice Film Festival, is seeking to remind a world consumed with the coronavirus crisis that the climate crisis is just as urgent and isn’t going away.

Thunberg appeared by video conference from school Friday for the launch of “I Am Greta,” which is screening out of competition at Venice. The film follows the Swedish environmentalist from the beginning of her school strikes in Stockholm to her low-carbon travels around the world demanding that political leaders curb emissions.

The film, shot and directed by Nathan Grossman, contains never-before-seen footage of Thunberg’s harrowing two-week sailing journey across the Atlantic to speak at the U.N. climate conference in New York in 2019. At one point in the voyage, undertaken to avoid the carbon footprint of flying, Thunberg cries out that she’s homesick and misses her dogs.

“It’s so much responsibility,” she wails, as the high-speed ship slams into the waves. “I don’t want to have to do this.”

Even though the film follows the #FridaysForFuture mass demonstrations that Thunberg launched through 2019, the era feels like a lifetime ago given the current COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on big assemblies.

Thunberg, now 17, urged the world to not forget the climate crisis and said the environmental campaign continues “in the way that is the most safe and that doesn’t put anyone at risk, in line with COVID-19 restrictions of course.”

In Stockholm on Friday morning, for example, she was out there striking before school, wearing a facemask and socially distanced from others. Thunberg returned to school last month after taking a year off for her activism.

The film debunks some of the criticisms of Thunberg, showing her writing her own speeches and making clear she was the driving force in the campaign, not her parents or other environmental interests. At the same time though, it makes viscerally real the pressures that were allowed to accumulate on her as the movement grew.

Thunberg said she appreciated that Grossman didn’t further what she said was the stereotype of her as “the angry, naive child who sits in the United Nations General Assembly screaming at world leaders.”

“That’s not the person I am,” Thunberg said. “He definitely made me seem more like a shy, nerdy person, which is the person that I am.”(SD-Agencies)