Featuring Sue Halpern. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

The citizens of Easter Island were entirely dependent on trade related to their abundance of sandalwood trees—until there was no abundance. So what did they do? They cut down the last fucking sandalwood trees and then had to give up the island entirely.

Obviously, having a big head doesn’t make you smart. And events of the past two years have proved that the instantaneous spread of information only makes a lot of people even dumber. Pollution, rising seas, and catastrophic weather events are already claiming lives everywhere, but who wants to hear downer talk from a bunch of liberal eggheads who are getting rich from elitist hoaxes anyway?

A passionately lyrical new film from B.C. veterans Velcrow Ripper and Nova Ami (who worked together on Occupy Love), Metamorphosis is not aimed at nihilists hoping to get raptured up when the volcano blows. This richly episodic doc, which comes in at just under 90 minutes, is a celebration of what we still have and of people who are fighting to keep it. That fight isn’t always on the legal/political front, as most of their subjects are using art, science, and plain old hand power to get across messages of both change and conservation. (Remember when “conservative” had that connotation? Yeah, me neither.)

The movie’s varied participants face the camera at times but do all their talking off-screen, and are only identified during the end-credit sequence. There’s a kind of through-line established early on, through the writing of Sue Halpern, whose book Four Wings and a Prayer follows the life cycle of monarch butterflies, now under threat because of accelerated seasonal changes. Sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor is another standout—literally, as he makes humanoid figures to be placed underwater, where they commingle with fish and other forces of nature.

Elsewhere, Garbage Warrior Mike Reynolds builds self-sustaining houses out of common refuse, Mexican poet Homero Aridjis uses beautiful words as weapons, and inner-city residents find new purpose pursuing alternative energy in working-class neighbourhoods. Spectacular aerial footage alternates with tight close-ups for a globetrotting yet intimately panoramic—if sometimes overly hypnotic—view of our lonely island.

The filmmakers will be on hand for the doc’s opening night at the Vancity Theatre on Tuesday (June 26).