Review of 'The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind'

Watched this late last night, and it wasn't at all the film I was expecting. Perhaps because I'd flicked through the book in a shop I was expecting a booster-ish paean to entrepreneurial spirit and triumph over adversity. The last ten minutes was like that, but the preceding 90 minutes was all about the adversity - about political corruption, the introduction of cash crop production to subsidence farmers, the way that the farmers are squeezed into deforesting their land by corporations that hold all the cards. We see how hard it is for the eponymous boy to get access to education - he's thrown out of the government school when his parents can't afford the fees any more, and how dismal is the meagre school library where he does his research into electricity generation.

In the end he makes a windmill, from tree trunks and bicycle parts, that drives a salvaged electric pump to bring water to the villagers' parched fields. I was struck firstly by how visionary this was - because he'd never seen a windmill. While wind-driven pumps are common in dry landscapes in the US and in Australia, there were none where he was - there were no windmills at all. 

He might have been better building a mechanically driven water pump rather than one that generated electricity to charge batteries that would then power an electric pump, but part of his genius was that he not only understood how a dynamo worked but could work with the mechanical elements that he had - it might have turned out that the dynamo worked but the windmill flew apart or blew down. I'm humble in the face of such practical skill, which is completely foreign to me; I can't look at things and imagine them into a working system at all.

The film has a happy ending - the villagers survive the drought, and the boy gets a scholarship so that he can go first to school, and then to university in the US, and then on to give TED talks. I'm not any sort of expert on sustainable farming or hydrology, but I couldn't help wonder whether what he had invented was a system for accessing fossil water reserves, and that this was not really a sustainable solution to the farmers' cruel dilemma.

A great and compelling film, watched on BBC iPlayer.