While the team at Insight Productions long had a Greenpeace project in their sights, it was originally envisioned as a scripted property. However, once Insight discovered U.K.-based Met Films was working on a feature doc on the same subject, it gave the Toronto prodco an opportunity to get into a new genre: the feature documentary.

“We had a mutual passion for the story and we wanted to make a big movie, so we decided to do it as an international coproduction, a U.K./Canada coproduction,” John Murray, producer, Insight Productions, told Playback Daily.

The Jerry Rothwell-directed How to Change the World, produced by Insight, Netherlands-based Daniel Film and Met Film Production, tells the story of Greenpeace’s founding by a group of young Canadians in the early 1970s.

Following a successful world premiere at Sundance, which nabbed it the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for editing, the film made its Canadian premiere last night (April 26) at Hot Docs.

With a budget of over $2 million, How to Change the World was made in partnership with broadcaster SKY UK Limited, the British Film Institute and Bell Media, and was also financed through tax credits from the U.K. and Ontario. Toronto’s Kinosmith is distributing.

Bell Media’s participation in the project was secured early in the film’s development, following a successful pitch by Insight CEO John Brunton, recalls Robin Johnston, director of factual and reality, independent production at Bell Media. 

“It was also an easy story to get excited about because it was such an important Canadian story and one that hadn’t really been told so it was kind of a no-brainer really,” Johnston told Playback Daily. “They just had such a clear vision of what they wanted this thing to be that it came almost fully formed when it landed, when we saw the first rough cut, the first assembly, and we were really blown away.”

How to Change the World will air in Canada on CTV on a still-to-be-determined date. Bell Media currently holds the Canadian rights for the documentary, including broadcast and digital rights.

The doc will also receive a theatrical release this summer at Cineplex locations across the country.