Among the most current buzzwords, when speaking of landscape and environment, terms such as climate activism, climate justice, radical ecology, political ecology, eco-anxiety, even climate radicalism, or even eco-terrorism, have come to the fore in recent times.
Words behind which lie very different positions, united by a potentially subversive charge that generates individual and collective actions of protest, civil disobedience, and resistance. One opposes, on the one hand, a status quo of political agendas now recognised as unquestionably inadequate and, on the other, the dominant anthropocenic (an abused but convenient term…) self-absolving and minimising narrative.
Cinema, be it documentary or fiction, absorbs this sentiment that is spreading more and more every day, pushing the most diverse people to act for the environment, to do something to get out of the role of passive spectators who will live in the ruins of the ecological catastrophe (paraphrasing Anna Tsing).
In that something is done there is the multiplicity of situations that we have tried to represent with five stories of environmental commitment, five landscape revolutions, real or verisimilar, as different in their development and protagonists as they are similar in their assumptions.
What do the anarchist activists of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, protagonists of the only documentary in the programme (The Spark), have in common with the kids who organise and finance an ecological project on a global scale (The Crusade)? And how much can an Icelandic environmentalist waging a one-man war against the aluminium industry (The Electric Woman) resemble the anarchist ecoterrorists who threaten to attack the powerful of the Earth (The East) or the young revolutionary of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta who fights the oil companies’ abuse of power and defends his land devastated by extraction (Disco Boy)?
We cannot and will not answer but certainly the climate crisis is the challenge of today. We are its cause but we can also be its solution and, as always, cinematic storytelling has the power to be much more than just an entertainment tool. Indeed, even on these issues it can be an exceptional driving force in opening new horizons of awareness and inspiring individual and collective action to shape a more sustainable and just future. (SZ)
Insights
Didascalia immagine: fotografia tratta dal film La scintilla (L’étincelle) di Valeria Mazzucchi e Antoine Harari
