The Ants and the Grasshopper (2021)
There's a moment in Raj Patel and Zak Piper's documentary where you see it written all over the faces of the Malawian delegates: a quiet, devastating shock. They've travelled from one of the poorest nations on earth to the supposed richest country in the world, and what they find there is homelessness, apathy, and a staggering indifference to everything beyond America's own borders. That single cultural collision, captured without commentary, without editorialising, just the silent weight of realisation, is worth the price of admission alone. It's the kind of moment that good documentary filmmaking is built for.
The central irony powering The Ants and the Grasshopper is almost cruel in its precision. Anita and her community in Malawi are doing the actual, hard, unglamorous graft of making real, tangible change in their local environment. They're farming, organising, building something out of very little. And they're being absolutely battered by a climate crisis they did nothing to cause. Not a thing. The injustice of it is visceral, and Patel and Piper make sure you feel it.
In a bid to force some accountability, Anita and her community pack up and travel to the United States, hoping to speak directly to American farmers and politicians. It's a cracking premise, and it sets up a classic David-versus-Goliath dynamic that feels genuinely charged with possibility. The kind of confrontation that makes you sit forward in your seat. What they actually find, though, is a sobering and deeply uncomfortable reality check. Nobody's waiting with open arms. Nobody's especially eager to listen. And the poverty they encounter on American streets is, in some cases, worse than what they left behind in Malawi. That's not a rhetorical flourish. That's just what's there on the screen.
I found myself thinking of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind while watching this, another story rooted in Malawian resilience and the sheer ingenuity people deploy when the world refuses to help them. But where that film finds something genuinely uplifting in its resolution, The Ants and the Grasshopper is far more willing to sit in discomfort and stay there.
On a technical level, this is a well-made piece of work. The photography is visually engaging throughout, and there's a pulsing, propulsive soundtrack that keeps things moving even when the conversations themselves hit a brick wall, which they frequently do. Patel and Piper have a strong eye, and they know when to let a face do the talking rather than reaching for voiceover to fill the silence.
But here's where I have to be honest about my reservations, because they're significant. For all its observational brilliance, the film suffers from a real structural problem: it has no idea where to end. We watch these resilient, remarkable people slam into wall after wall of systemic indifference, and then the documentary sort of... stops. There's no path forward offered, no solutions floated, no moment of genuine breakthrough. Which might be the point. The world often doesn't offer those things. But a film still needs to know what it wants to say, and by the final act, this one feels stranded.
The risk of that approach is that you leave the viewer not just unsettled, which is fine and often worthwhile, but genuinely hopeless, which is a harder sell. I understand the argument for refusing to wrap things up neatly. The climate crisis doesn't have a tidy resolution, so why should the documentary? But there's a difference between earned ambiguity and a narrative that's simply run out of road.
Three and a half stars.
What saves it, ultimately in the most literal sense, is Anita herself. Her courage, her clarity, her refusal to stop demanding to be heard even when it's patently obvious no one powerful is listening. The film is worth seeing for her alone. It's a vital, eye-opening piece of work that forces you to confront a glaring global hypocrisy, even if it leaves you staring at the ceiling afterwards wondering what on earth any of us are supposed to do about it. Sometimes that discomfort is exactly the point.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-07-27
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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