Film review: Power Station

When you put solar panels on your roof, the sun pays for them. It might not feel like it when you get the installation quotes in, but those panels will generate more than they cost and the universe pays you back. So why aren’t we putting them everywhere? Why are so many people living in energy poverty when there is such energy abundance right over our heads?

Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell have a refreshingly obvious solution: just get on with it with your neighbours, and turn your street into a power station.

If you’re familiar with their work, this is the kind of thing that you might expect from a couple whose last project involved opening their own bank, printing their own money, then buying a million pounds of their neighbours debt and blowing it up. It’s a blend of activism, art, and the old fashioned legwork of community organising. And since Dan is a film-maker, we get a front row seat – if you make room for yourself among the cushions and the books and the tired-looking dog.

Having hatched the idea of launching their own Green New Deal for the street, we join them as they head off to meet the neighbours. Many agree to take part, especially since the plan is that residents will get solar for free. Some of the folks we meet on the doorstep will become recurring characters throughout the film, a diverse mix of ages and races in the London borough of Walthamstow.

It’s not a straight-forward process. There are set-backs and the stresses of crowd-funding. At one point they need £100,000 to move the project forward, and decide they will sleep on their roof until the money comes in. It’s November and this looks like a terrible idea until the TV news picks up on it. Other stunts include a bid for Christmas number one with a group of school children, and a campaign to grow 10,000 sunflowers to fill the street – both community-based projects that push open people’s idea of what might be possible.

While Dan insists the pair of them are “as punk as a cup of tea”, there is nevertheless a punk ethic here – that refusal to wait for permission, the confidence to do it yourself. That’s true in the project as a whole and in the cinéma vérité film-making, which is unvarnished and ramshackle, with handheld cameras and no concern for tidying up before pressing record.

Of course, it takes a lot of care and craft to look this effortless, and Power Station has more going on than meets the eye. It’s subversive, playful, self-deprecating, often very funny. The 12 and 14 year olds in the house both rolled their eyes when I booted them off the TV to watch a documentary, but they both stayed and enjoyed themselves.

Importantly, this is activist film-making and there is purpose here beyond entertainment. Aside from Hilary’s ability to print money as art, there’s no reason why you couldn’t do this on your own street. Indeed, towards the end of the film we see how other streets around the country are getting in touch, joining online workshops on how to do it for themselves. The power in the title isn’t just solar. The film is an active demonstration of the power of community, of what can happen when people work together around a vision for their neighbourhood. You can keep your caped superheroes and billionaire philanthropists. This is how the world is saved: bit by bit, by ordinary people in ordinary places, with the endless generosity of the sun.

Power Station is in cinemas this weekend, and here’s the trailer: