Director: Laura Nix
Plot: Meet passionate teenage innovators from around the globe who are creating cutting-edge solutions to confront the world’s environmental threats – found right in their own backyards – while navigating the doubts and insecurities that mark adolescence. Take a journey with these inspiring teens as they prepare their projects for the largest convening of high school scientists in the world, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), a program of the Society for Science and the Public.
Runtime: 1 Hour 45 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Verdict: Makes the Future Feel Bright
Thoughts on Inventing Tomorrow
Thoughts – We get to see teenagers from around the globe, two from Indonesia who are planning against the illegal dredging of the coast of their island, one from Hawaii who has been studying the arsenic levels after tsunamis have moved the original areas. We have one from Indian who is from a city which has grown beyond its capabilities and now the once great clear lake is a sewage wasteland. We got three from Monterrey Mexico who has worried about the air pollution. These teenagers are all preparing to head to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair to see if the younger generation could offer the answers to the big problems to their corners of the world.
We do follow just the four different locations and it could easily have followed 100s to 1000s of different projects, which shows us the promise that we are getting to see from the next generation of scientists and problem solvers, these young people are giving up large parts of their childhood just for this moment to try and make a change to first, their cities and soon the world.
The biggest plus side of this comes from seeing both male and female teenagers given this chance, we know in the past in some of the countries we are visiting we won’t have seen these opportunities for the young women to share their ideas. We do get to focus more on the idea of the next generation of minds over a true study of the ideas they are planning which is good, because certain elements of the science could easily go over people’s heads.
For a documentary this is one of the most educational any adult could have, because it shows ideas can come from different locations around the world, for children this could motivate them to be the ones to make the difference in the future. This is one of the inspirational passionate driven documentary, it doesn’t tell us a story of what happened, it tells us how we could find the solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
Overall: Must watch documentary that will bring hope for the future of our planet.
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