Bell Media’s Award-Winning Original Documentary How To Change The World Launches Across Multiple Platforms Beginning December 3

“…a fascinating, skillfully assembled chronicle…one of the year’s most satisfying documentaries.” – Los Angeles Times “Top Ten Of The Year” – NOW Magazine “…a real-life thriller with larger-than-life heroes.” – The Huffington Post “…a compelling story of one environmentalist’s remarkable combination of prescience, grit and timing.” – The Globe and Mail TORONTO (November 17, 2015) – Following a critically acclaimed, triumphant run at film festivals throughout the world, and theatrical premieres in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles, Bell Media presents the exclusive North American television and streaming premiere of Jerry Rothwell’s How To Change The World, the Canada/U.K. co-production about the birth of the modern green movement and the creation of Greenpeace. Commissioned by Bell Media in 2013 and recently long-listed for an Academy Award^®, the 110-minute documentary feature rolls out across a sequence of Bell Media platforms through a programming strategy designed to present this ground-breaking film to a maximum audience, beginning Thursday, December 3 at 9 p.m. ET/MT when the doc has its Canadian broadcast premiere on HBO Canada, coinciding with the 2015 Paris United Nations climate conference. Click here for a preview of How To Change The World. Currently with a 95% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, earlier this year How To Change The World began its extraordinary run as the Day One World Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Award for Editing, as well as the Candescent Award. Its subsequent appearances at festivals throughout the world continued to amass awards and accolades, including: Top Ten Audience Favourite at Hot Docs; Best Environmental Documentary at Sheffield Doc Fest; Best Feature Film at Sebastopol Documentary Festival; Best Feature Film at Global Visions Film Festival; Best Feature Film at Portland EcoFilm Festival; and the Pare Lorentz Award from the International Documentary Association. “As the world convenes for climate change talks in Paris, we’re reminded of how relevant the work of Bob Hunter and Greenpeace remains. We’re immensely proud to be involved with this timely story about the global impact of a visionary Canadian,” said Mike Cosentino, Senior Vice-President, Programming, CTV Networks and CraveTV, Bell Media. “Heartfelt congratulations go out to our partners at Insight Productions and Met Film on a truly remarkable, thought-provoking, and meaningful film.” “I’ve wanted to tell this story for a very long time, so it’s been incredibly gratifying to see how audiences, critics, and juries around the world have responded to it,” said John Brunton, CEO of Insight Productions.  “I’m very grateful to our friends at Bell Media for having the foresight early on to help bring this important project to fruition.” Bell Media’s launch plan for How To Change The World is as follows:

• Premium, Pay TV audiences get the first look on Thursday, December 3 at 9 p.m. ET/MT;
• the next day, December 4, the film joins the #iCraveFridays schedule on CraveTV™, where it will anchor the popular Documentary collection;
• the title premieres on Bell Media’s flagship network, CTV, in a reduced commercial time broadcast on January 3 at 8 p.m. ET/PT;
• the next day, January 4, How To Change The World will stream on CTV.ca.

In 1971, a group of friends sail into a nuclear test zone and their protest captures the world’s imagination, giving birth to Greenpeace and defining the modern green movement. Directed by Jerry Rothwell (Town of Runners), How To Change The World chronicles the adventures of this eclectic group of young pioneers – Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists, and American draft dodgers – who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up making history. At the heart of the group is Bob Hunter, a charismatic Canadian journalist from Winnipeg who somehow managed to bind them together into a group with a single purpose, often at huge cost to himself. The story is framed by his first-person narrative, drawn from his writings and journals about the group, voiced alongside animations based on his early comics. Media savvy from the beginning, the group captured their seat-of-their-pants activist adventures on 16mm film and coined the term “mind bomb,” knowing that the advent of global mass communications meant that the image had become a more effective tool for change than the strike or the demonstration. Together they pioneered a template for environmental activism by attempting daring iconic feats like placing small rubber inflatable boats between harpooners and whales, blocking ice-breaking sealing ships with their bodies, and spraying the pelts of baby seals with dye to make them valueless in the fur market. How To Change The World is written and directed by Jerry Rothwell. From U.K.’s Met Film and Daniel Film, and Canada’s Insight Productions, the film is a BFI and Sky presentation in association with Bell Media, Impact Partners, and Shark Island Productions. Producers are Al Morrow, and Bous De Jong. Supervising producer is John Murray. Executive Producers are Jonny Persey, Stewart Le Marechal, David Nicholas Wilkinson, John Brunton, and Barbara Bowlby. Executive producers for BFI are Christopher Collins and Lizzie Francke. Executive producers for Sky are Lorraine Charker-Phillips and Celia Taylor. Executive producer for Impact Partners is Dan Cogan. Executive producer for Shark Island Productions is Ian Darling. For Bell Media, production executive is Robin Johnston. Corrie Coe is Senior Vice-President, Independent Production, Bell Media. Tracey Pearce is Senior Vice-President, Specialty and Pay, Bell Media. Mike Cosentino is Senior Vice-President, CTV Networks and CraveTV, Bell Media. Randy Lennox is President, Entertainment Production and Broadcasting, Bell Media.