Hard Rain Film Released on Eve of Key UN Climate Talks

Bob Dylan's powerful, prophetic song, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, is set to become the unofficial soundtrack to the Copenhagen climate talks

Copenhagen, 26 November 2009 - Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature by Mark Edwards and Bob Dylan will be released on DVD at the opening of the Hard Rain exhibition in Copenhagen on 6 December - the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference.

The film, released in partnership with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), combines a rare live recording of Bob Dylan performing A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall with the photographs from Hard Rain and an extended illustrated commentary, in a moving and unforgettable exploration of the state of our planet and its people at this critical time.

The global issues highlighted in Hard Rain are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that define the 21st century. While each problem is understood to some degree by decision-makers, they are typically addressed as separate issues. Hard Rain puts the pieces together and shows that the world has little chance to solve any one of them until we understand how they all connect by cause and effect.

The DVD is accompanied by a specially commissioned essay by Lloyd Timberlake. The Urgency of Now cuts through the muddled thinking and failed policies that have delayed a radically new worldwide approach to climate change, poverty, the wasteful use of resources, population expansion, habitat destruction and species loss. The essay title was inspired by a response to Hard Rain from the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"If Hard Rain is a photographic elegy," said Mr Brown, "it is also an impassioned cry for change. Forceful, dramatic and disturbing, it is driven by what Martin Luther King called 'the fierce urgency of now' - and I believe the call for a truly global response to climate change is an idea whose time has finally come."

Full Release