UK's The Rainmaker Content has acquired the feature documentary "Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics" for international distribution prior to its premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on March 9, 2024. The 90-minute film investigates the global addiction to plastic and the growing threat of microplastics to human health. The documentary is an official selection of the SXSW Festival 2024 Documentary Spotlight. "Plastic People" will also be screened at the United Nations’s critical next round of negotiations for a new Global Plastics Treaty, which takes place next month in Ottawa.
"Plastic People" is produced by Vanessa Dylyn ("Into the Inferno") and Stephen Paniccia, with White Pine Pictures’ president Peter Raymont and Canadian author and environmentalist Rick Smith as executive producers. Funding for the documentary comes from Telus Communication’s pilot documentary film initiative, Telus Independent; the Canada Media Fund; the CMF POV Fund; Telefilm Canada; and philanthropists including Dragonfly Fund, Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation, and Nona Macdonald Heaslip.
Rainmaker Content’s key executives, Greg Phillips and Vicky Ryan, have collaborated with White Pine Pictures for almost 20 years. During their time at Content Film/Kew, Phillips, and Ryan represented a string of internationally successful projects, including "The Border", a hard-driving TV drama series set in a paranoid post-9/11 world; the feature documentary "Toxic Beauty"; and "Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power." "Plastic People" has been positioned as the follow-up film to "Toxic Beauty".
Greg Phillips, co-CEO of Rainmaker Content, referred to the environmental issue addressed by the film: “Plastic pollution is not just an environmental problem, it’s an urgent threat to human health. Plastic People is the first film ever to explore comprehensively on camera the worrisome true dimensions of the plastics crisis. It underlines the challenge and points to solutions in the most engaging of ways," commented.