To jump on my soapbox for a moment, we really need more films like this. Climate change can be such a difficult, nebulous issue to portray simply, and personal stories are the link which can grab an audience and lead them in. (I would, in fact, quite like to strap Alan Jones to a chair and make him watch it).

The film follows Maria Tiimon, an i-Kiribati woman who now lives in Sydney, as she works to encourage action on climate change and raise awareness of the impacts on her home country. Tiimon travels between Sydney, Kiribati and the climate conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, while also dealing with various family issues along the way.

We’ve all heard the statistics, but I’ve never been presented with such graphic visible evidence of rising sea levels. A whole village in Kiribati, with an ailing sea wall that has collapsed in places, is literally inundated with water at high tide and the water flows through the houses.

While a friend who saw the film wondered afterwards if the rise could definitely be attributed to climate change, I did some checking and discovered that there is indeed scientific evidence that shows a six millimetre yearly sea level rise in Kiribati since 1992. So there, climate sceptics.

Zubrycki clearly realises this personal story approach works across social issues, having used the same method to draw attention to the issue of refugees with his 2003 film Molly and Mobarak. I caught up with Tom before the screening, and he confirmed that with all his films, he tries to tell the story through a couple of key individuals. The Hungry Tide deftly incorporates the personal element, where Tiimon comes into her own in the lead-up to Copenhagen, and the building political element, as we observe first the immense hope in the civil society representatives at the conference before the realisation of the heartbreakingly disappointing outcome.

Copenhagen was when Zubrycki knew the film would come together, he says. He knew there would be all kinds of fall out and implications, which there were, although not quite in the way he expected. But ultimately he was not planning on making a pessimistic film: “I fundamentally believe that documentaries can make a difference,” he says.

While some of the circumstances can seem despair-inducing, “overall you get the sense that there are so many committed people working to change the situation.” This is something that will come out of the film, he says - there are people who care. Like Molly and Mobarak, the film will be screened at Parliament House in Canberra in an effort to encourage action.

The previous evening I watched two documentaries with completely different approaches to representing the personal element, both made up entirely of user-generated content. Map My Summer, the Australian response to Life in a Day, was launched by Screen Australia earlier this year and called for Australians to send in footage of their summer.

We Were Here is the resulting film which can be watched on the Map My Summer website, and it shows an Australia where, apparently, everyone is under 30 and lives near the beach. We Were Here was immensely disappointing, and is probably a comment on the limitations of user-generated content. Amy Gebhardt was the emerging filmmaker selected to be mentored by George Miller to wrangle the footage into something watchable. They apparently received 350 submissions making up 15 hours of footage, and if what we saw is the best of that footage then either there was a massive failure in the publicity campaign for the project or Australia really is just a teeming mass of drunken hooligans.

I realise this may sound like a culturally elitist rant, but I don’t take issue with the fact that for many Australians, summer really does mean cartwheels and beers at the beach. The drunk teenagers jiggling their naked selves around did make me cringe a little, but I was expecting some of that to appear. I get that summer is about having fun, being carefree, larking around and enjoying the fabulous temperate climate we have. I wasn’t looking for beautifully constructed shots. I was, though, hoping for some elements of the unexpected, the culturally diverse, even an old person for chrissakes.

Gebhardt made a valiant effort to draw out a theme or two, with a montage of people dancing early on, and there was some footage of Cyclone Yasi that brought some gravity - but ultimately most of the clips looked thrown together and I really wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be taking from the film. Granted, by definition a project based around YouTube was always likely to attract younger contributors, and I couldn’t help but think I would be much less critical if I was watching it online - cinema just seemed the wrong platform.

There were sweet moments - a small girl screaming on a ferris wheel had the audience giggling, and the bats passing overhead at dusk provided some atmosphere. But ultimately my friends and I were relieved when it was over, and the muted clapping from the audience suggested similar feelings.

Having said that YouTube will likely attract certain types of contributions, Life in a Day managed to cover much more ground - but of course it had a massive head start being a global project made by Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald. The makers also had a lot more to work with - something like 2500 hours of footage through which to sift, and whole teams of people to do so.

The result is a wonderful, messy, ultimately uplifting film about the complexity to be found within the human race. Sure, it doesn’t delve deep, but that’s not really the point. It is ultimately a "feel-good" film, but it doesn’t completely shy away from shades of grey. It includes cancer sufferers, the graphic slaughter of a cow in an abattoir, a young man being rejected by the girl he loves, snippets of poverty and protest, even fighting. There’s even some old people!

It’s not all focussed on the exceptional - there are ordinary moments, ordinary people. One of my favourite clips is of an English university student driving home to see his father, and the two of them share burgers from a roadside stall while the dad ribs his son about nothing in particular. I didn’t spot any clips from the Pacific Islands, but otherwise most continents seemed to get a look in.

One quibble I had with the film was the lack of subtitles for the non-English sections. While the majority of the film was in English, I would love to have known, for example, what the Masai woman was saying in response to the question, "What do you fear?" Presumably this was a conscious decision, perhaps something along the lines of demonstrating equality between different languages, but if the point of the film is to improve cross-cultural understanding then it would really help to know what everyone is saying.

Fun Festival Fact #2: Having begun with hippos, my latest recurring animal is the performing monkey. Position Among the Stars (coming up in my next post) and Life in a Day both contained footage of these sad creatures, chained and forced to perform for money. A little less fun than randomly appearing hippos, although I will be continuing the primate theme today with a trip to see Project Nim.