'Joker' Fame Joaquin Phoenix Teams Up With Amazon Watch For Short Film

Apart from his blistering portrayal as Joker, actor Joaquin Phoenix is creative waves lately owing to his Award acceptance speeches where in one of them, he talked about climate change, in the other he thanked all of his fellow nominees and another one saw him talking about racism.

Now, Phoenix has linked with environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion and non-profit organization Amazon Watch for a short film sounding the alarm around deforestation and global wildfires.

Guardians of Life, which Variety reveals exclusively below, also stars Rosario Dawson, Matthew Modine, Oona Chaplin, Q’orianka Kilcher and musician Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes – all of whom play a medical team racing to save an unseen patient dying of heart failure on the operating table.

Describing the two-minute film as a call to action, Phoenix said: “I did it to raise awareness about the meat and dairy industry’s effect on climate change. The fact is we are clear cutting and burning rainforests and seeing the negative effects of those actions worldwide.

“People don’t realize there’s still time, but only if we act now and make sweeping changes to our consumption. We can’t wait for governments to solve these problems for us. We can’t wait until the election to try to make these changes. We have a personal responsibility to make changes in our own lives and act now.”

Director Shaun Monson said he felt compelled to make the film in the style of a narrative short as documentary-style PSAs aren’t always effective in moving audiences to take action. “Instead of focusing on deforestation, ice melting and species extinction, we use a story as a metaphor,” he explained.