...about the pope's 2015 encyclical, or papal letter, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home." The film, a joint project of Off the Fence Productions (behind the Oscar-winning documentary "My Octopus Teacher") and the Laudato Si' Movement, will hold its premiere at the Vatican Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of ecology. Beginning that evening, it will be available on YouTube free to watch.

The release of the film — previewed during the COP26 United Nations climate summit — was timed with the Vatican's formal entry into the Paris Agreement. The Vatican, which collaborated on the documentary, invited church leaders, scientists and ambassadors to the Holy See to the premiere, the latter also attending a high-level meeting where Vatican officials called for increased actions on climate change.

"The environmental crisis is not an issue for Catholics alone. It affects everyone, now and future generations," Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said in a statement. "This film is a clarion cry to people everywhere: We have to act together, and we have to do so now."

More than four years in the making, "The Letter" follows the story of five people, each representing groups often marginalized in international environmental deliberations, on their way to Rome for a meeting with the pope to discuss Laudato Si' and the growing global threats of climate change and rapid biodiversity loss. They include Arouna Kandé, a climate refugee in Senegal; Cacique Dadá, an environmental defender and leader of the Maró Indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon; Ridhima Pandey, a youth climate activist from India; and Greg Asner and Robin Martin, biologists studying coral reefs in Hawaii.

To read an interview with writer and director Nicolas Brown, please click here.

To watch the trailer, please click here. Beginning October 4, the full movie will be free to watch on YouTube.