Agenda 2100, 15min., Brazil
Directed by Stéphanìe Habíb, Thais Guisasola
When a rare solar storm creates a fleeting opportunity to transmit data into the past, Gaia and a small resistance group send a message to 2020 — a final warning and a final hope.
https://www.instagram.com/agenda2100
Get to know the filmmaker Stéphanìe Habíb:
1. What motivated you to make this film?
In 2010 I was studying International Relations, and a class on environmental policy put the IPCC reports in front of me. What unsettled me wasn’t the severity of the scenarios — it was how close they were, and how directly they followed from decisions being made right now. I wanted people to feel that the way I had felt it, and a scientific report can’t do that. A story can.
2. From the idea to the finished product, how long did it take for you to make this film?
Sixteen years. The idea arrived in 2010, the project was approved for funding in 2016, and the film was completed in 2026. In between: a pandemic that held the resources, a world that changed while we waited, and a screenplay I rewrote from the ground up because the science had moved.
3. How would you describe your film in two words?
Climate warning.
4. What was the greatest obstacle you faced in completing this film?
Making an independent dystopian science-fiction film — a genre built on scale — on a small budget, without compromising the world we had to build, and without abandoning sustainable production methodology, which costs more. We solved it with partnerships instead of spending: all vehicles were electric, costumes were built from reused materials, and the set was constructed largely from materials recovered from landfill.
5. What is your favorite stage of the filmmaking process?
Development and production — for opposite reasons.
Development is where this film actually lived. Years of reading, revising, going back to the science and back to the screenplay. It is solitary, slow, and it is where everything gets decided.
Production is the reverse: a hundred people turning that into something real in a handful of days. After all those years alone with the research, standing on a set built from reclaimed materials and watching 2100 exist in front of the camera is a kind of vindication nothing else gives you.
6. When did you realize that you wanted to make films?
The same day. I didn’t want to make films and then go looking for a subject — the subject found me, and film was the only way to deliver it. I enrolled in film school for one reason: to put this story into the world.
7. What film have you seen the most times in your life?
The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars — and, on the other side of my shelf, The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth.
Looking at that list now, it explains the film I ended up making. Two of them taught me that an invented world only works if its rules are absolutely consistent. The other two are about this world, and about a warning nobody wanted to hear in time. Agenda 2100 sits exactly between those two shelves: the scale and craft of the first pair, the urgency of the second.
8. In a perfect world: who would you like to work with or collaborate with on a film?
Leonardo DiCaprio. Not for the name — for the track record. Over the last five years he has produced a run of environmental documentaries that are as rigorous as they are cinematic: Yanuni (2025), on Indigenous chief Juma Xipaia’s fight against illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon; We Are Guardians (2023), on deforestation and the Indigenous forest guardians resisting it; Ozi: Voice of the Forest (2023), which carried the same subject to an animated family audience; Path of the Panther (2022); and The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 (2021).
What I admire is that none of them settle for being worthy. They are made with real craft — and they reach audiences that would never open a scientific report. That is exactly what Agenda 2100 is trying to do, and two of those films are set in my own country. Working with someone who has already committed that deeply to Brazilian environmental stories would be the natural place for this project to go next.
9. You submitted to the festival via FilmFreeway. How has your experience been working on the festival platform site?
Wonderful, and for a specific reason: I’m dyslexic, and forms are one of the hardest parts of this work for me. FilmFreeway keeps everything in one place — the materials, the submissions, the festival replies — so I’m not rebuilding the same information from scratch every time, which is exactly where things go wrong for me.
And they have. Submitting to festivals outside the platform, I once completed everything, paid the fee, and forgot to attach the film. Another time I filled out an entire form, then paid for and submitted the empty one instead. Neither mistake had anything to do with the film. Having a single place where I can go back and see precisely what was sent, and what wasn’t, is what makes this part of the work possible for me at all.
10. What is your favorite meal?
Japanese food. I could eat it every day and never get tired of it.
11. What is next for you? A new film?
A feature. Agenda 2100 continues: the short becomes the opening of a longer story, and the research that built it carries over.
