Editor's Note

Since the release of The Cost of Growth in October 2025, we are grateful to have received a lot of feedback and engagement. As you can imagine, this film has been a political project that touches upon a lot of sensitive, real, raw, or polarized themes that are a subject of heavy debate. 

The film has met people, where they are at, which is in a million different places. For some, the film felt overwhelming, too dense, too radical. For some, it felt like an acknowledgment of years of activism, embodied knowledge, merely a repetition of what is known. Some have had a hard time with the NATO chapter, the focus on direct action, and the magnitude of the themes we discussed, while for some this has been an incredibly eye-opening experience, or a nudge towards curiosity and conversation.

We expected that.
Making a film like this means making thousands of decisions, knowing that whatever you do, something will always be missing. 

One piece of feedback, however, stayed with us. While the film clearly shows many dynamics of white supremacy (racist migration policies, dehumanization as a tool of warfare, the exploitation of the Global Majority) we never explicitly name it.

The absence wasn’t intentional. The film is built entirely from interviews, and in reviewing the material we realized that the words white supremacy never came up explicitly in the conversations we recorded. Because of that, it didn’t make it into the original edit. But once it was pointed out, we could not unsee it.

So we added a short segment to the film, to name it clearly.

For us, the film has always been about connecting systems of power: colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the economic logic of endless growth. White supremacy is deeply entangled with these systems, shaping the modern colonial world and the hierarchies that sustain it. 

And naming it matters.

At the same time, we don’t believe the crises we are living through can be explained by a single system alone. The world we are trying to describe is shaped by many overlapping structures of power; colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, each reinforcing and feeding into the others in complex ways. The film focuses on challenging green growth because that’s where our own political journey as climate activists began, and because this  promise of capitalism but green remains one of the most powerful narratives sustaining Europe’s progressive self-image.

Making this film was chaotic, challenging, and deeply collective. It involved years of conversations, disagreements, writing, rewriting, and trying to do justice to the people and struggles represented in it. Every scene is the result of countless choices: what to include, what to leave out, how to connect stories from different countries, histories, and movements. We were not aiming for a perfect narrative to tie together everything in the 90 minutes, but rather an imperfect start for continued work on challenging the systems of injustices and oppressions. 

This is also why we are genuinely grateful for the feedback that pointed out the absence of the term white supremacy in the film. Naming it explicitly adds an important layer to the analysis, and we believe the film is stronger for it. 

We hope the film can continue to function as a starting point for such much needed conversations. Not only online, but especially in real life; in rooms filled with people who are curious, critical, and willing to learn together. Spaces where disagreements can unfold with patience and care, and where people can engage with complexity. Being open to critique is part of making political work. None of us are outside the systems we are trying to challenge while all of us take a different position. We are all learning as we go. And in times like these, we need more conversations, more collective thinking, and more spaces where people can come together to make sense of the world, and imagine collectively how to transform it together.

This small change to the film is part of that ongoing process.

— The filmmaking team