"Rousing stuff"  ★★★★
 Empire

Just Do It lifts the lid on climate activism and the daring troublemakers who have crossed the line to become modern-day outlaws. Documented over a year, Emily James' film follows these activists as they blockade factories, attack coal power stations and glue themselves to the trading floors of international banks despite the very real threat of arrest.

"A smart, funny, adrenalised portrait of 21st century activism" Danny Leigh - The Guardian


John Grierson, the grand father of documentary film defined the art form as the “creative treatment of actuality”. And few directors have taken the ‘creative’ part of this more seriously than Emily James. Emily is arguably one of the most creative documentary filmmakers of her generation. Every one of her films is utterly different from the last.


Her best known film, The Luckiest Nut in the World (Channel 4, 2002), stars an animated American peanut who sings originally composed songs about the nuts he’s met in developing countries, and the negative effects of trade liberalisation on these countries economies.

The Guardian saw the film and said: “Emily James is a genius,… and will in time be revered as a television innovator”, and Broadcast magazine called her “One of the ‘Hottest Talents in Town”.

A Brief History of Cuba in d minor, 1999), and an exploration of the Dogme 95 film movement featuring a busking narrator telling the story in rhyme, digital special effects, and a donkey (Wag the Dogma, 1998).



In 2004 Channel 4 commissioned Emily to make Don’t Worry,a 4 part series which followed a cast of hand puppet presenters of a ‘light entertainment news show’ as they interviewed real people about issues of questionable corporate behaviour.

Watch more from Don’t Worry here.

In 2005 Emily embarked on a very different sort of film for her, and for the first time tried her hand at the straight up observational doc. Over a period of 3 months, across a cold wet winter, Emily documented the occupation by local residents of a Hackney café due to be demolished by developers.

Part funded by Channel Four the film became The Battle for Broadway Market (2006), a touching portrait of a community pulled apart by gentrification but brought together through their struggle against it.


So, what will Emily make out of the 250 hours of material that she and her team have gathered for Just Do It? Emily says it’s too early to say, but that you should expect the unexpected.