Magnolia Pictures To Qualify ‘Just Look Up’ For Oscars; Documentary Examines Climate Activist (And Standup Comedian) Michael Greenberg

EXCLUSIVE: Magnolia Pictures has set an Oscar-qualifying run for Just Look Up, a documentary about Michael Greenberg, “the brash, relentless founder of Climate Defiance” who is using innovative and confrontational tactics to urge action on global warming.

The film directed by Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall and executive produced by Oscar winner Adam McKay and two-time Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer will play in New York and Los Angeles for one week beginning December 4. A wider theatrical release will follow in the first quarter of 2027.

Four-time Oscar nominee Signe Byrge Sørensen and Natja Rosner produced the documentary, which features music from Chappell Roan, Doechii, and Billie Eilish. “Just Look Up,” notes a release, “is a rowdy, irreverent portrait of a generation with no room to fail.”

Greenberg (who performs standup comedy when he isn’t occupied with his activism) heads “a youth movement known for confronting politicians and oil executives face to face. In the tradition of Gandhi’s Satyagraha, the Civil Rights Movement, and ACT UP, they use radical nonviolent direct action to call out Big Oil, corporate CEOs, and the politicians who enable them. The film charts a motley, idealistic crew as they improvise, fail, regroup, and push on, often to laugh-out-loud effect.”

Just Look Up premiered at the prestigious CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen, where it won the F:ACT Award. It has screened around the world, including Tribeca Festival, the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, Italy, and the Sydney Film Festival in Australia. It will screen later this month at IDFA, the world’s largest documentary film festival, in Amsterdam.

“This film exists to move people beyond despair and into action,” said directors Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall. “These young people are turning fear and frustration into something powerful, drawing on a long history of ordinary people coming together to challenge power and create change. They remind us that change is possible, and that there can be real joy in making it happen. They’re also some of the funniest people we’ve ever filmed, which turns out to be a pretty good strategy for taking on Big Oil. We’re thrilled to partner with Magnolia, a home to so many films that have inspired and shaped us, to bring this uplifting story to as many people as possible and make real change feel tangible.”

Range Select closed the deal on behalf of the filmmakers. In addition to McKay and Oppenheimer, executive producers include Staci Roberts-Steele and Geralyn Dreyfous.

“How do you take on the climate crisis? It’s too big. It’s too vast,” Emma Wall noted at a recent Q&A after a screening for the International Documentary Association. “Our hope was to really enter it in a way that both was a character-driven film — because we knew information wasn’t really what people needed anymore. We needed to connect to a story, and we also needed to connect to something that gave us a sense of agency and uplift… So, we wanted to find a character as interesting as Michael.”

“We were very determined… to not add to the doom and gloom of just the climate crisis, which there’s enough of already when you read the news,” commented Betsy Hershey. “And so, when we were at our first coffee with Michael and he told us he was a standup comedian, that really sparked our interest greatly.”

The film includes some of Greenberg’s comedy sets, which are notable for their originality and his willingness to explore very personal topics. But Just Look Up’s primary focus is on the activism of Greenberg and his young colleagues, who have disrupted events held by Joe Manchin, when he was the U.S. senator serving West Virginia, and J.D. Vance when he was running for vice president. Greenberg is unapologetic about his techniques.

“For the climate criminals we’re confronting, conflict is actually necessary,” he said at the Q&A. “It’s how you reach people; it’s how you tell the story. The action with Manchin — that reached five million people. [CNN contributor] Van Jones, as you saw, was on TV that night talking about it. So conflict can actually be constructive in these situations.”