Ahead of its world premiere at SXSW on Saturday (March 9), feature doc Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics has found an international distributor in the UK’s Rainmaker Content.

The 90-minute film from Canada‘s White Pine Pictures investigates the global addiction to plastic and the growing threat of microplastics to human health. The film is an official selection of the SXSW Festival 2024 Documentary Spotlight.

Rainmaker has bagged worldwide sales rights. Two of its key execs, Greg Phillips and Vicky Ryan, have worked with White Pine execs for almost 20 years. While at Kew Media Distribution (KMD) and Content Media, they represented White Pine titles such as hard-driving TV drama series The Border; feature doc Toxic Beauty; and Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power.  Plastic People has been positioned as the follow-up film to Toxic Beauty.

The synopsis for Plastic People notes that as plastic is such a robust material, it never turn disappears and only 10% of it has been recycled, with the other 90% degrading into harmful microplastics.

Plastic People will highlight the dangers through first-time-on-film testing of toxicity levels in the human body and reveal how these tiny particles are being found in our organs, blood and even the placentas of new mothers.

Author and science journalist Ziya Tong is co-director of the film, along with Ben Addelman (Discordia, Bombay Calling, Nollywood Babylon). Tong has taken a personal approach to the shoot, visiting leading scientists around the world and undergoing experiments in her home and on her food and body.

Plastic People is produced by Vanessa Dylyn (Into the Inferno) and Stephen Paniccia, with White Pine Pictures’ President Peter Raymont and Canadian author and environmentalist Rick Smith as executive producers.  Funding for the documentary comes from Telus Communication’s pilot documentary film initiative, Telus Independent; the Canada Media Fund; the CMF POV Fund; Telefilm Canada; and philanthropists including Dragonfly Fund, Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation and Nona Macdonald Heaslip.

Phillips, Co-CEO of Rainmaker, said: “Plastic pollution is not just an environmental problem, it’s an urgent threat to human health. Plastic People is the first film ever to explore comprehensively on camera the worrisome true dimensions of the plastics crisis. It underlines the challenge and points to solutions in the most engaging of ways.”

Rainmaker recently struck a representation deal with another Canadian producer, No Equal, for international sales rights to three scripted drama series: The Collector: Redux, The Work and Erratic. The company was formed after Kew Media Group, the parent of KMD, went into administration in 2020.  SXSW runs March 8-16 in Austin, TX.