An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, thrust former United States Vice President Al Gore back into the media spotlight. In the movie he made a succinct, persuasive case for the exponentially growing threats to our planet caused by greenhouse gas effects from carbon emissions. A decade later, Gore returns to the big screen in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, who shadowed Gore closely across several continents to record how man-made climate change—or global warming, as it used to be called—has drastically worsened. In the film audiences see glacier melt accelerating in Greenland; watch fish swim in Miami Beach streets flooded by ever bigger tropical storms and rising sea levels; learn how the worst Middle Eastern drought in 900 years led to the displacement of 1.5 million Syrian refugees, a harbinger of that country’s current crisis; and observe Gore in a sensitive meeting with high-ranking Indian government officials who insist that their nation’s economic growth requires cheap, coal-burning energy plants.

Bonni Cohen: We first met Al Gore in July of 2015, and we finished the edit, the first time, in time for Sundance, this past January. So we finished production in November of 2016.

We were in terribly boring meetings, where Al would be talking to a business guy, or a solar-energy guy, and [we shot] hours and hours of the climate-leader trainings. But the truth is that all of those more mundane hours of time together position you to be able to say, in a crucial moment, “Hey, Al, do you mind if we come in and shoot that meeting that you’re going to have with John Kerry?” Or, “Do you mind if we’re in there with the Indian minister?”

Like Csikszentmihalyi flow [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience].

Since you were editing in between filming, as you went along you could sense an emerging narrative. You had a vision, maybe, of where this was all going to wind up. But when you shoot verite, breaking events are primarily what shape the material, aren’t they?

Shenk: And [the islands’ then-President] Mohamed Nasheed was another leader who transcended what you would think of as a normal politician. I think that today when people think of a politician it’s of someone who compromises their own humanity, their own beliefs . . .