At the Bel

Photo Credits: Martin Wilhelm (with permission from Thomas Lacoste)

With “Uprisings,” Thomas Lacoste has created a documentary that captures the strength of an ecological movement as well as its power of existence. The film is based on personal testimonies, often moving, and on a choice of staging that rejects didacticism to prioritize words, gestures, and landscapes.

At the Bel-Air cinema on this Friday, April 3, in a packed theater, the director defended this position clearly: he did not want to make a journalistic or activist film in the classic sense, but a cinematic film capable of creating a sensitive encounter.

“We are not at all in a journalistic, didactic, or educational film&sldr; we are in a cinematic film that bets on the strengths of cinema and particularly its sensitive strengths,” he explained.

This formal ambition gives the film a true uniqueness. Lacoste emphasizes a “profoundly egalitarian aesthetic” that should “redistribute the roles and shares of each and everyone,” and that rejects the militant recitations that he considers “purely mortal” in cinema. The result is a chorus portrait that is very familiar, where voices not only comment on a struggle, but make it tangible in its contradictions, joy, and human density.

Embodying a Movement

The director extensively recounted the origin of the film, born, according to him, from the spring of 2023, a time of brutal criminalization of the movement. He said he was struck by the violence of the state, but also by the collective intelligence of the Earth Uprisings.

“It is in this spring of 2023 that the project takes root,” he recalled, adding that he wanted to respond to a situation where activists were portrayed as “eco-terrorists,” even though they were defending common goods, land, and water.

His narrative also clarifies the film’s method: first establishing a “trust register,” then building interviews on a logic of maieutics, allowing life trajectories, know-how, and territorial connections to emerge.

Lacoste wanted to show “how these people inhabit their territory, inhabit their know-how, share them at the heart of the movement.” He emphasizes a point that runs through the whole debate: “There is already a resistance policy in place,” meaning a concrete, organized, and experienced resistance.

Joy as a Political Force

One of the strongest contributions of the debate was the way Lacoste articulated ecological struggle with joy and subsistence. He described what he calls a “subsistence policy,” involving pantries, canteens, self-construction, mutualization, care, and material support, capable of providing “over 100,000 meals” in support of mobilizations.

For him, this discreet but essential infrastructure is not peripheral: it is at the very heart of the movement’s political power. Because there are “10,000 ways to enter it,”

In the film and in the debate, the filmmaker connects this dimension to a simple but powerful idea: not to be “out of touch with reality.” He recalls being struck by a militant’s statement that emphasizes the importance of never losing the connection with the territory, gestures, animals, soils, and other forms of life.

He also emotionally evoked the memory of Lucie Aubrac and the idea that the question of subsistence was an “unthinkable” aspect of the National Resistance Council, allowing him to link the Earth Uprisings to a larger historical continuity of resistance.

An Assumed Stance

The film, as convincing as it is, remains focused on an ecology embodied by young activists, farmers, life technicians, and engaged intellectuals, while the broader social issue remains in the background.

Lacoste partly admits this when he explains that he could not show what happens in cities or peri-urban areas, and that this will be the subject of a future film.

In other words, “Uprisings” portrays the energy of a movement and the beauty of its alliances well, but it makes less visible how this dynamic could interact with other social circles, other working-class communities, other forms of experience of marginalization or precarity.

The debate at Bel-Air clearly shows this: the filmmaker talks about a film that opens doors, but its framework for now remains part of a highly politicized world, familiar with the codes of radical and territorial engagement.

Social connections with other organizations exist. With the Peasant Confederation, of course, but more modestly with “Solidarity,” or even the CGT (on the A69), without being entirely programmatic.

So, attacking Lafarge construction sites may not be perceived with the same satisfaction if you are a simple construction worker!

In the theater, a man awkwardly expressed his concern about not being heard in working-class environments, where ecological direct actions easily pass for “terrorism” to families whose only echoes of current events often come from mainstream media, and survival necessities are limited to short-term concerns.

To which Thomas Lacoste will respond, without fully understanding the scope of the question: “Are these faces of terrorists?” Referring to the witnesses in his film.

Larzac as an Inverted Mirror

Like a temporal loop, one cannot help but draw an analogy with the film “Marching in Larzac” by Christian Rouaud. Different times of activism, and different societal norms. Here the fight is initiated by farmers, rather conservative, and “Catholic,” defending their tools against the state’s rationale of the time: the takeover of agricultural land for the army, proposed by the sinister Minister of Defense, Michel Debré.

During their epic battle, the farmers of the plateau gather around them (notably thanks to Guy Tarlier), everything that is most militant, including the most sectarian fringes (Maoistsâ€&#brvbar;), but they hold onto the reins of their struggle until the end, for 10 long years.

This transforms them forever by opening them up to the world. They will even achieve the unthinkable: merging Larzac with the Lip workers. Nearly 100,000 people “workers and peasants who are coming to a wedding,” gather on the plateau in 1973â€&#brvbar;

And the staunchest “grunt,” emboldened, speaks up, with high words and lyrical tones on display, to celebrate the memorable day: “Never again will peasants be Versaillais. That is why we are here to celebrate the wedding of Lip and Larzac.“.

A certain Bernard Lambert, who will become, along with José Bové, one of the founders of the National Federation of Peasant Workers’ Unions in 1981, which will give rise to the Peasant Confederation in 1987â€&#brvbar;

Hearts high! There will be another 8 years of struggle before the election of François Mitterrand, and thus the end of the military camp extension projectâ€&#brvbar;

A Cinematic Film

But perhaps the most interesting point of the exchange is the way Thomas Lacoste refuses to dissociate cinema from politics. He stresses that his films are not activist films in the narrow sense of the term:

“My films are not activist films. But not at all. They are films that bet on the pure powers of cinema,” he says. This statement summarizes the success of “Uprisings”: not just explaining, but making one experience; not imposing a discourse, but creating an openness to the world.

The film thus finds its strength in this paradox: it is both a tool of struggle and a work of cinema, an object of protection, and a sensitive proposition. This is what makes it precious.