Into thin air: ‘Breathe’ considered a world ravaged by climate change

LOS ANGELES — In a near future, Earth is left essentially uninhabitable due to a dearth of oxygen, survivors to live underground, only making brief trips to the surface.

Jennifer Hudson, Quvenzhane Walle and Common play Maya, Zora and Darius, a family scraping to survive this apocalypse.

After Darius is presumed dead, Maya and Zora must fight for survival when two mysterious visitors show up to their compound.

“Breathe” director Stefon Bristol says the film is a window to a potential future, as we stand on the verge of leaving our children and future generations with a terrible planet.

The movie never reveals why the world ended or why the world lost its oxygen, leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions.

“I thought that was brilliant because it places responsibility on everybody,” Stefon Bristol told Spectrum News. “Everybody gets to be pointed at: I am responsible for climate change, the viewers are responsible for climate change.”

Is “Breathe” a movie with a call to action? That, Bristol says, is up to the individual.

“Do they want to take action, or do they want to wait around? What decision do you want to do?” he said. “But know that if no one is going to do anything about it, this is what is going to happen well within our time, and I am scared that something like in the film is going to happen.”

Quvenzhané Wallis as Zora and Jennifer Hudson as Maya in “Breathe.” (Photo courtesy of Breathe Productions Inc.)

The Earth, Bristol says, is always going to adapt and change. We just have to learn to adapt and change with it.

Quvenzhané Wallis once felt that she, like her character, Zora, has a talent for science. 

“In school, science was my favorite. Then I did this movie, and I was like, maybe I don’t know much about science as I thought I did. But I still love science. I love to create in labs. But me and Zora are on two different pages of our level of science,” she said.

“Breathe” is now on Video on Demand and in theaters.

Click the link above for the full interview.