TIFF24 REVIEW: Quotum [Quota] [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 3 minutes
Release Date: July 23rd, 2025 (Netherlands)
Studio: Klik! Distribution
Director(s): Marieke Blaauw, Joris Oprins & Job Roggeveen
Writer(s): Marieke Blaauw, Joris Oprins & Job Roggeveen

It’s always the same sentiment: I don’t need to worry because it doesn’t affect me. This is especially true in our current cable news era now that everything has been politicized for profit. Watching a person being persecuted should ignite you to action because injustice never stops. As long as that door is opened, it will swing wider and wider until you become the next victim to be ignored. And the same is true for the planet. Thinking that you can do whatever you want with complete disregard for its impact on a future you won’t be alive to witness only works if you’re dead before the bill comes due.

We’ve been kicking the can of climate change for so long that the end of the road has finally arrived. It’s not an issue for your kids and grandkids to solve. There might not even be a solution. And it’s difficult not to laugh considering I’m old enough to remember what environmental protections and scientific responsibility can achieve. All anyone talked about thirty years ago was the hole in the ozone layer and we collectively repaired it by agreeing with the truth that we could. Global warming had that same potential. There was a hardline temperature threshold to avoid and we did nothing. More than nothing. We made it worse.

And because we’re still doing it despite the increase in extreme weather phenomenon and melting ice caps, it’s only fitting that the Oscar-nominated Dutch animation trio of Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins, Marieke Blaauw would lean into the absurdity of our complicity in our own self-destruction via their short film Quota. They not only skewer our indifference to the problem, but also our vain addiction to social media. Because it’s one thing to intentionally act as though none of the obvious signs matter. It’s another to want to tell the world you do while leveraging that apathy into views.

The characters are therefore both laughing at the premise of a new app that counts down their carbon footprint from 100% to zero and disregarding its impact on their own lives until the constant beeping becomes white noise. Little do they know, however, is that their own personal hardlines aren’t set to just stop that sound. Think of it instead as Mother Nature holding their feet to the fire: shape up or suffer the consequences now rather than pushing them off for the next generation. Because it’s only when the hurt hits home that we take notice. Sometimes that revelation provides room to improve. Sometimes it comes too late.

Anyone who’s a fan of Job, Joris & Marieke’s previous work will have a good idea about which is true here. They wield humor in a way that ensures the viewer recognizes the stupidity of their actions isn’t simply “cute” like the cubist-style humans acting as our placeholders on-screen. Our disregard for science is literally walking us towards a hellscape we cannot avoid. So, we laugh at the inevitable screams and blood because it’s funny, but also take pause in the realization that the scenario isn’t the joke here. We are.