Meet Samuel Rubin, co-founder of the UN's first Entertainment + Culture Pavilion

Alongside the pavilion, Rubin is also volunteering with ECCA, (Entertainment and Culture for Climate Action), a global collaborative initiative that aims to unite the cultural sector on shared climate goals and solutions and is supported by the UNFCCC and UNESCO.

Prior to serving on the convening team for ECCA and launching the Entertainment + Culture Pavilion, Rubin spent over a decade in impact entertainment and grassroots organising.

After creating his own production company in 2012 and producing his own social impact films, Rubin went on to co-found the youth activist and campaigning agency YEA! Impact.

He was also the impact producer for the documentary I Am Greta and co-founded the Hollywood Climate Summit. He has been recognised by Forbes, Politico and Grist50 as a climate leader in entertainment.

Local Peoples caught up with Samuel to discuss how art and entertainment will change the world:

Your work is heavily focused on nurturing and empowering the cultural industries to create more content that engages with our social and environmental crises. You also work a lot with impact films and documentaries. With the climate crisis threatening humanity’s future, why haven’t we seen climate storytelling shift culture on the scale that’s needed?

The reality is that right now we are getting our content from an increasingly narrow number of companies and media conglomerates. They do produce some amazing content, but it doesn’t always allow for creative freedom and it doesn’t always give us the global narratives that we need. There is a lot of gatekeeping that is capitalistically minded and increasingly relying on boardrooms and a certain type of decision-makers, which means we are not seeing enough climate stories or stories that represent the global majority.

We are also in a very hyper-saturated market with a lot of films and TV and streamers, and social media. People’s attention spans are very limited, especially young people.  How do we cut through? A big social or environmental impact film might have a marketing budget of $250,000 or $350,000, but blockbusters can have a marketing budget of one hundred million or more.

Look at Barbie, it had a marketing budget of 150 million dollars, it became a worldwide phenomenon and as lucrative as Harry Potter. Imagine what we could do if we had that kind of budget for an impact film and campaign!

On the other hand, we are also seeing social media empower creators to reach enormous audiences if they have the right stories. Recently I’ve been watching ‘Reesa Teesa’ Johnson. She made a low-budget, 8-hour series on Tik Tok and it got 400 million impressions in less than three weeks and now has over 40 million views. When I was watching it I was thinking, ‘Wow! This woman is doing that without a budget, why am I watching this?’ I was watching it because it was good storytelling. Now she is signed with CAA and has a deal with Netflix.

Your background is in impact producing, which is all about how we can use tools, campaigns, and techniques alongside a work of art to ensure it maximises its social or environmental impact. There is a great legacy of impact producing in the documentary world with groups like Doc Society, Good Pitch, and Participant Media, and we’re just starting to see some impact campaigns for fiction films like Don’t Look Up and Dark Waters.   What do you think makes a good impact campaign?

I honestly thought that the Don’t Look Up campaign was a bit of a missed opportunity. We need to move away from impact campaigns that are focused only on individual actions like turning off the light switch. We know we need a lot more, and the film echoes that. Adam McKay himself donated four million dollars to a civil disobedience organisation, but the types of actions needed for systems change weren’t really reflected on the film’s action page.

I learned a lot about impact campaigns when I worked on the movie about Greta Thunberg. We produced a campaign called ‘Can you hear us?’ It won a Best Campaign award at the Jackson Wild Film Festival, and I think it was very exciting because it showed that an impact campaign doesn’t have to be centred around one film.

When we started the impact program it was about ‘I am Greta,’ but then we expanded it to include other films, such as ‘Youth Unstoppable’ and ‘Humanity Has Not Yet Failed’ and made it about the intergenerational narrative and the climate movement more broadly.

A lot of people would say that good campaigns should focus on systems-level changes, help people see themselves as citizens as much as consumers, and foster a sense of collective agency. How else can we help change the narrative?

There is an idea in the public that if you want to fight for climate action, you have to tie yourself to a public building and be like Greta, or Jane Fonda, and get arrested. That is an important part of turning the tide, but there are also people like myself who are doing advocacy work and trying to influence policy, or getting institutions to play a bigger role in shaping culture. We have to help and facilitate people to figure out how to best leverage their own creative skill-sets and potential.

That’s exactly what you’ve been doing with The Hollywood Climate Summit, YEA! Impact and now the Entertainment+Culture Pavilion. I recently read the Mind The Culture Gap impact report you wrote about the Pavillion. Your vision is really inspiring and it was amazing what you were able to achieve in such little time and with limited resources. There is a growing recognition of the need for more climate storytelling in art and culture, but we don’t always associate that with the UN or high-level policy. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that?

Thank you for the kind words. It was definitely a big collaborative effort. We really do think it’s important that culture and the creative industries are recognised at spaces like COP and within the UN.

The IPCC is already calling out for content creators, cultural leaders, and mainstream media to catalyse behaviour change. They argue that if just 10 to 30% of social influencers and thought leaders engaged, it would change social norms and could become a positive climate tipping point.

But our report was called Mind The Gap because there is still a large disconnect between the power and potential of culture and entertainment and how it is represented at the UN. We have 33 out of 195 governments who signed on and joined the ‘Group of Friends for Culture and Climate Action‘, so we still have a lot more to go.

Simon Stiell, the director of the Secretariat of the UNFCCC has recently started to talk about culture in his public remarks, so that gives me hope.

We saw how the European Union, for example, decided that the phone chargers had to have the same electric entry path, so now the new iPhone and the new Samsung use the same charger. I use that as an example because it shows how policy can create change. We are going to need frameworks and funding mechanisms and incentives so that we can decarbonise the entire creative industry, and we also need more incentives to inspire and empower cultural creators to use their influence to create awareness and inspire action.