The Ants and the Grasshopper (2021)
The Aesop fable that gives this documentary its title sets up a neat moral framework: those who prepare and labour will survive, while those who idle will suffer the consequences. Raj Patel and Zak Piper invert that logic in uncomfortable fashion. Their 2021 film follows Anita Chitaya, a community organiser and farmer from Malawi, whose work transforming exhausted soil into productive land has already made her something of a local legend. She has organised the men of her village around gender equality, tackled food insecurity at a grassroots level, and built genuine, tangible change from very limited resources. The film takes her story and grafts it onto a much larger question: what happens when the people who have done everything right are punished for the failures of those who have done almost nothing? That question sits at the centre of a growing body of documentary work examining climate inequity, a subject that also runs through The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Chiwetel Ejiofor's 2019 feature about another young Malawian confronting resource scarcity through ingenuity and sheer determination.
Patel is perhaps better known as an author and academic, his books on food systems and global inequality having established him as a serious voice on these subjects well before he stepped behind a camera. Piper brings a background in documentary production, and together they work without the backing of any major studio, which gives the film a certain independence of spirit even if it occasionally shows in the tightness of the budget. At 74 minutes the picture runs lean, which suits the subject, though it does limit how much breathing room the narrative has to develop its more complex threads. The co-directors shot across Malawi and the United States, following Chitaya on a journey that takes her from her village to California farmland and eventually to Washington, where she attempts to engage politicians and policymakers on climate accountability. It is, on paper, a road documentary about persuasion, and its structural ambitions are considerable. The film sits alongside a wave of politically engaged non-fiction work from the early 2020s, much of it grappling with the widening gap between those who experience the worst effects of climate change and those whose policies and consumption patterns drive it. For a sense of how bleak that kind of environmental despair can feel when rendered dramatically rather than journalistically, The Road remains a useful, if grim, reference point.
Chitaya herself is the film's entire engine. She is not a professional subject in the documentary sense, not someone who has been media-trained or packaged for an international audience, and that quality of unguarded presence is what makes her so watchable. Her capacity to listen, to reason, and to hold a room is evident throughout, and Patel and Piper are wise enough to largely stay out of her way and let the camera observe. The American figures she encounters, farmers in California dealing with their own very different agricultural crises, sceptics of various stripes, and the occasional sympathetic politician, are treated without cartoonish villainy, which gives the film more credibility than a more polemical approach might have managed. The cultural contrast that emerges from these encounters, particularly around poverty, visibility, and whose suffering counts as a crisis worth addressing, forms the documentary's most resonant material. Readers who have followed the blog's coverage of African storytelling may also want to look at Once Upon a Time in Uganda, another 2021 documentary that examines the relationship between African creative communities and Western attention in a rather different register.
There is a profound, almost cruel irony at the heart of Raj Patel and Zak Piper’s 2021 documentary The Ants and the Grasshopper. We follow Anita and her community in Malawi, folks who are doing the actual, hard graft of making real, tangible change in their local environment. Yet, they are being utterly battered by a climate crisis they did absolutely nothing to cause.
In a bid to force some accountability, they pack up and travel to the United States, hoping to speak directly to American farmers and politicians. It’s a cracking premise, setting up a classic David-versus-Goliath narrative that promises to shake up the status quo.
But what Anita and her friends actually find across the Atlantic is a sobering, deeply uncomfortable reality check. Instead of being met with open arms and a willingness to listen, they are confronted head-on by the stark poverty of America, a sprawling homeless crisis, and a staggering, almost wilful apathy towards the rest of the world. I found this cultural collision to be the most fascinating element of the entire film. It must be utterly mind-bending to travel from one of the poorest nations on earth to the supposed richest, only to discover people living with less, and in worse conditions, than the very communities you left behind. The directors capture this dissonance brilliantly, letting the quiet shock on the faces of the Malawian delegates speak volumes.
On a technical level, the picture is undeniably well made. Patel and Piper have crafted a visually engaging piece of journalism, backed by a great, pulsing soundtrack that keeps the momentum driving forward even when the conversations hit a wall. However, for all its observational brilliance, the film suffers from a significant structural flaw: it simply doesn't offer any solutions. We watch these incredibly resilient individuals hit a brick wall of systemic indifference, and the documentary just leaves the narrative feeling a bit of a mess, stranded without a clear path forward.
This is a highly interesting, beautifully shot documentary that succeeds wildly in highlighting a glaring global hypocrisy, even if it leaves the viewer feeling profoundly hopeless. By refusing to offer any tangible solutions or a neat, uplifting resolution, the film risks becoming an exercise in despair. Yet, the sheer courage of Anita and her community demands to be seen. It’s a vital, eye-opening piece of cinema that forces us to confront our own complacency.
The Ants and the Grasshopper lands in a tradition of activist documentary that is more interested in bearing witness than in providing a programme for change, which will satisfy some viewers and frustrate others in equal measure. It is a polished but emotionally demanding piece of work, one that uses a single extraordinary woman as a lens for examining systems that are very much larger than any individual. Whether a documentary has a responsibility to point toward solutions, or whether honest observation is a sufficient contribution on its own, is a debate the film quietly provokes without ever quite settling. Anita Chitaya does the hard work. The film watches. Make of that what you will.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-07-27
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Ants and the Grasshopper (2021) on YouTube
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