Category: Take One Action

Huh. The Mushroom Speaks is a strange little film. In an experimental style, it combines interviews with scientists about the importance of fungi to life on earth, and its potential in countering human damage to the environment, with more philosophical musings told silently in captions on screen supposedly from the perspective of a mushroom. It’s eh . . . odd.

Some of this is extremely fascinating. I love to hear people, who are passionate about a subject, talk about it, no matter what it is. So hearing scientists tell you all about how fungi transforms the barren sand of an abandoned mining site into life-sustaining soil to support trees and plants is riveting. Hearing how fungi can be grown to eat up oil spills or heavy metals in waterways is incredible. The more woo-woo side of things – less so.

I mean I get that’s the whole point, interrogating the human social systems that have led us to this species-threatening event of climate change, and imagining new possibilities based on the social systems of other lifeforms. I’m here for that, and don’t disagree. It’s just . . . it starts to slide away from the scientific into the realms of more . . . Is there a word for where crust punks meet hippies and New Agers?

Anyway, I definitely feel I came away having learnt more about fungi and mushrooms.

Jesus, that was rough.

Delikado focuses on the work of indigenous land defenders in the Philippines, protecting their island against illegal logging. All the odds are stacked against them, and the film follows the huge sacrifices they make in trying to protect their land and people.

Let’s just start here – everyone knows that the law is only the law for the powerless. You don’t curtail people who are powerful and you don’t get between the rich and their money, those are the only rules that get enforced. So the fact that the logging is illegal, that is only a word used to give authorities permission to shake down poor people with no other choice for getting income. But actually impacting the bottom line of those whose wealth relies of the destruction of our natural resources? That’s never going to be on the table.

In response to the complete impunity abundant all around them, local people form PNNI, an organisation which co-ordinates citizen’s arrests of loggers, and the confiscation of their equipment. Kap and Tata go out to the forest barefoot and silent in small teams, and scout logging sites. When the loggers go for a fag break or a slash, Kap and Tata sneak up and swipe their chainsaw. They have so many that PNNI headquarters has a fence made out of rusting chainsaws.

If it’s safe to do so, and as the film progresses it becomes so less and less often, they make a citizen’s arrest. This involves making a record of the incident and explaining to the logger that what they are doing is illegal, and what penalties they can face under the law. Then they turn them loose, just without their chainsaws. It’s surprising how gentle and empathetic the guys are with the loggers. Given how strongly they feel the destruction of their land, given how many have lost friends at the hands of illegal loggers, you would expect they would see them as their enemies and treat them with contempt. But it’s the exact opposite. They tell them they understand what it is like to live in poverty, they understand what it is like to feel there is no other way. They tell them about the penalties but what they are really telling them is, the men who hired you, who will get rich off this, they won’t go to jail, but you will. The risk of being out here is all on you.

Bobby is the PNNI lawyer. He makes sure the team always keeps on the right side of the law. Everyone understands that the loggers could cut down thousands of trees with no reaction from the police, but if even one of the PNNI steps out of line on an action, they would come down on them like a ton of bricks. The classic old ‘the law is powerless to help you, not powerless to punish you’.

Watching Kap and Tata and the rest go on these raids is stomach-churningly tense. The loggers have lookouts, the lookouts have guns. Kap and the rest are there in t-shirts and flip-flops, with a spanner for dismantling the chainsaw. The bravery of these men, to try to sneak past armed guards all to defend the trees, it’s incredible. No one can question their dedication.

And the danger is very real. Under Duterte life is cheap in the Philippines. He openly advocates for extrajudicial killing, and he simply labels his enemies as drug traffickers to ensure that they can murdered without question. As long as there is money in it for him and his cronies, people can log as they like.

The Mayor of El Nido in Palawan is Nieves, a staunch ally of PNNI, indigenous people’s land rights and environmental protections. The saying goes that there is no such thing as an honest politician, and it is proven true as much because of what happens to the ones that are honest as to what happens to the ones that aren’t. Nieves has the gall to stand up against indiscriminate tourist expansion, advocating for sustainable eco-tourism that is proportionate and appropriate for the area. She pointed out how the inward expansion was necessitating roads which was contributing to vast swathes of illegal logging. No good news if, like the Governor, you ran a logging business, or like the President, you have money in tourist resorts. Nieves gets to find out what happens if you get between rich men and their money.

Delikado shows the price of concerted community resistance, and how having the law on your side can only take you so far. It gives a face and a family to those who risk death rather than let our natural world be lost forever. We owe them a huge irreparable debt.

Hostile is a look at the hostile environment policies implemented by the UK government, and tracing both its origins and impact. The hostile environment policy follows the same tack that you find in a lot of government services with lists that target reduction – the dole, disability allowance, mental health care – in that the hope is you will kill yourself and help them get the numbers down. The point is to make attempting to get what you have every right to so difficult you will just give up and go away, or despair and go mad. The Kafka grinder.

The phrase ‘hostile environment’ is a great soundbite euphemism used by the government to sell its racist persecution of migrants. To those who support the policies, they hear ‘hostile’ and it sounds like a clear denunciation, strong and violent, a call to open hostility. To those who might not support it, but are not going to be directly effected by these policies, they hear ‘environment’ and it sounds passive, more of a change in tone, a background administrative tightening up. It describes an abstract culture, not a list of actions. So what does it actually mean for people on the ground?

Farrukh came to the UK as a student. He studied, got his degree here. He worked and raised his family here. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, he worked tirelessly at the NHS, keeping the place functioning, making sure it could be there to support and care for people facing a life-or-death illness. He couldn’t see his kids while he worked flat out, as his little boy’s health was vulnerable. He’s almost 40 years old and lived his entire adult life in the UK. And he may be deported at any time.

He has applied to the Home Office year after year, each time costing him thousands upon thousands of pounds. Each time denied for spurious reasons. He’s never had so much as a parking ticket, but he’s twice been rejected under the provisions for threats to national security. Even when they walk it back on appeal, they reject him again on other equally ridiculous reasons.

He’s not some oligarch, he’s an ordinary working bloke. He doesn’t have the money for a legal team, and Legal Aid has been paired back to nothing. So any minute he gets not spent working to pay off the debt from all these attempts, he’s trying to put together a needlessly labyrinthian application and understand the complexities of ever-changing migration law. He lays out on the dining room table tomes and tomes of paper. Folders, binders, photocopies of photocopies.

If your application is rejected, your right to work can be immediately suspended as well. So on any given day, you can receive word you are no longer allowed to work, and immediately lose your job. And as you are a rejected migrant, you have no recourse to public funds, meaning you can’t claim unemployment benefit, even though you’ve paid in decades’ worth of tax.

When this happened to Farrukh, he had no other option but to take out loans and put household expenses on credit cards. It was only until he could appeal the decision and get a new job, but combined with the cost of the applications themselves, he’s now in more than £50,000’s worth of debt. His wife says he won’t discuss it, because when they do, they can’t sleep at night. They have no idea how they are ever gonna repay it.

He says he would have given up and gone home by now if it weren’t for his children. He has two kids. They were both born here. They are British by birth, and have never known any other country or home. Yet despite being born here, they are both ‘illegal immigrants’. Their legal status depends on their father’s status, which remains unsettled after decades, and if he was deported, they would be sent with him. Just think about that for a minute.

Farrukh came here for a better life. He did exactly what was asked of him, entered legally, worked hard, got his degree, got a job after uni, paid his taxes. Yet the life he has made for his children is even more precarious than the one he had. Everything they have can be snatched away from them at a moment’s notice. Even as the years pass, they have no sense of security, the sword of Damocles is forever over their heads.

Ironically all the things that they say about migrants – that they are illegal, that they are scroungers, that they don’t integrate with the community – these are products of Home Office policy, not the people themselves. It’s an astonishing piece of projection. They call them illegal, even though they entered legally, never broken a law, and have complied with every effort to ensure their legal status. They call them scroungers, even though it’s government policies that put them out of work, drove them into destitution with exorbitant costs, and that deny them recourse to public funds so charitable community support is the only fallback. They say that they don’t integrate with the community, but they are the ones preventing them from putting down roots, withholding from them the security of a real home, of isolating them in a permanent limbo.

As awful as all these tangible things are, there are also the intangible things. Like the mental torture of waiting for someone to decide your fate for almost 20 years. Of the strain it puts on your marriage to be in tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. As you watch Farrukh sit chain-smoking over his bundles and bundles of papers, you wonder what all this must be doing for his blood pressure.

And Farrukh’s story is just one in this film. There are, unfortunately, so many people like him. So many people have stories just like this. People whose lives have been utterly destroyed by cruel, dehumanising, racist policies.

This is an excellent film. I found the score and some of the directing choices too heavy-handed at times, which is a shame because it’s completely unnecessary, the subject of the film speaks for itself. Chalk it up to a first-time filmmaker finding their feet. And whatever quibbles you may have with it on a technical level, Hostile is a powerful portrait of the impact of racist state policy on the lives of ordinary people, a violence which goes unnamed and largely hidden from the public eye. This film puts a face on the ephemeral rhetoric and to show how, when these abstract ideas touch ground, they hit like a hurricane.

P.S. Good to see Glasgow get a look-in at the end, with the Kenmure Street action being one bright ray in an otherwise dark vista. Glad to see us on screen for the right reasons for once.

Foragers looks at the criminalisation of gathering Palestinian cooking herbs and vegetables on traditional Palestinian land by the Israeli state.

The problem for those who seek power is that we actually live in a world with an overflowing abundance capable of meeting our needs. That is why separation from the land is such a vital condition for creating scarcity. Colonialism relied on successive waves of dispossession, dependency, and deculturation. Removal from land, removal from self-sustenance, removal from culture.

As one of our most basic needs, food is at the heart of these struggles. In the Palestinian kitchen, za’atar bread is a staple. Folk could go out, pick some za’atar in the fields, and bring it home for cooking. Whenever people would gather together for a meal, there is the smell of za’atar.

Now much of Palestinian land has been appropriated and used as Israeli capital. The za’atar is cultivated for market production, and Palestinians must pay to buy back their own food from their own lands. It is another mechanism to put them at the mercy of Israeli power. It also has a disruptive cultural impact, as eating traditional food, whether at a family meal, social gatherings or community celebrations, must now also be an act of financial support to the Occupying state.

But it can be really hard to get people to buy your product if they can just go outside and pick it out the earth for free. So even after the dispossession of their lands, it becomes necessary to make it illegal to pick wild za’atar. How do you do this? By claiming it must be protected under conservation.

Now, this is a classic move. Despite the cuddly, irreproachably moral image of conservation here in the coloniser countries, conservation is and always has been a tool for the powerful to control access to land by the powerless. It is also super steeped in fascism and eugenics, in a big ole yikes! way.

In Foragers, it is almost laughably Orwellian, with enforcement officers chasing down people in fields teeming with za’atar to fine them for picking it. It is a ‘species under threat’, they say straight-faced, looking directly at Palestinians.

Under such circumstances, foraging and feeding oneself becomes an act of defiance. To insist on one’s right to food, right to life, to continue to maintain a sustaining relationship with the land, are acts of national rebellion. The foragers in the film find it to be a source of dignity, their own act of resistance.

Really interesting documentary, deftly handled, with use of constructed scenes allowing us to see this (by virtue of its nature) hidden practice.

Coming Home is a short film about the Freedom Dabka Group, a group of Palestinian-Americans in Brooklyn who use the traditional dance of dabka to connect with their heritage and keep it alive.

The guys in this film grew up on the basketball courts of Brooklyn, but their parents still remember the Palestine they were forced to flee. They live in hope of returning, but how do they pass that on to their children who have spent their whole lives in America? The answer for these guys is dabka.

Dabka for them is not simply a dance move, it is connection and community. It connects them to a tradition that reaches back through generations of their people, and bonds them together in a joyous celebration. They do it anywhere, dancing on the streets, in stores, wherever they can practice a little footwork.

While in exile, Palestine is kept alive by its people, in its people, and in dance is expressed, and shared collectively. It is made real for generations born separated from it. Great little film.

You remember The Corporation? Documentary movie released back in 2003, it put forward that if corporate personhood was a thing, then the corporation would be diagnosed a psychopath. Big favourite in charity shop DVD sections near universities all throughout the 2000s. It made you start reading and then swiftly abandon the book No Logo, remember?

This is ‘The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel’, of how corporations have rebranded in the past quarter-century to co-opt tackling social issues to deflect from scrutiny of their actions, and mitigate moral outrage at their relentless pursuit of profit at any cost to human life or the earth itself. This is not simply the greenwashing that takes place in advertising, although that is a massive part of their charm offensive, but how they have positioned big business as the solutions to the very problems they’ve created. So this means touting the idea that more investment is needed in massive fossil fuel companies so they can ‘carry’ us over the hump to where renewable energy is ready to meet all our needs. This means social enterprise and public partnership being the solution to underfunded public services, without mentioning that the tax avoidance committed by those companies is what is responsible for that deficit. It means shaking your head about how wasteful and incompetent governments have failed to create wealth for their poverty-stricken citizens, and suggesting that maybe government should be run more like a business, by business people, with as much privatised as possible.

Like most call-to-action movies, it’s really comprised of two parts. The shit stick, and the dangling carrot. The shit stick is when you are repeatedly whacked over the head with stuff that you already kinda know, but which is horrifying when you think about it all at once. The dangling carrot is the bit at the end where they tell you to recycle or whatever. This film’s shit stick is very well put together, if somewhat heavy-handed in its presentation, coz, you know, American. But its dangling carrot is maybe even more depressing. Coz it is so anaemic and underwhelming, and seems to divert the energy of groundswell grassroots movements back into the broken political system that failed to prevent this situation in the first place.

Bleak as it was, I was riding with this film all the way through the corporate manslaughter, and ecological devastation, and undermining of any form of accountable governance, and the creation of the pandemic through a reckless, destructive and dangerously intrusive food industry, and the breakdown of social cohesion after years of poverty and hopelessness. And what actually made me hop off the wagon was when at the end, the upswing of hope was for us to pour our energy and money into electing people like Bernie fucking Sanders. I was just like, “NOOOOOOOOO!!!” All the anarchists that live in the back of my head were screaming. Mate, you have just got through talking about 25 years of history where a revolving door of people’s faces on the front this machine, Democrat and Republican, have not changed one iota of the exponential expansion of corporate greed. Why, oh, why, do you think this will be different?

And I know it’s the American way, to pour your faith back into democracy, but the form of democracy you have is so archaic and insufficient. Why are you choosing what has not protected you in the first place? Also, you can’t go, “the answer is grassroots movements, grassroots movements, grassroots movements”, then be like, “Stop! Everybody pour all their energy and resources into this one person to represent us.”

I dunno. The older I get the less faith I have in representative democracies. People campaigning against poverty boasting about how they raised £10 million for Bernie’s campaign. Like, how much could that kind of money have done if it had been spent actually just directly on people in poverty? Like, stop electing people to solve the problem, and just solve the problem. If the schools are bad, organise to fix the school, don’t organise to collect money, to create a campaign, to elect someone, to sit on the board, to make decisions, to fix the school.

I mean, at one point one of the beacons of light to usher in this new dawn was the election of Sadiq Khan as mayor of London. Are you fucking kidding me? Is this how low we’ve set our sights? He’s a Labour MP, he sat as part of the government under Tony Blair, that grinning muppet you see at the Davos summit, rubbing shoulders with the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan Chase. That’s the outsider voice who’s about to turn the tables on this shit? Sitting in Scotland that elected Labour for a century, and a century on still has the highest poverty rates in Western Europe, you do just wanna ask, “What are you on about?”

Ugh. Anyway.

It’s a decent enough movie for analysing the economic devastation that’s been wreaked the past few years. It’s gonna be a firm favourite of charity shop DVD sections near universities for many years to come, along with Feel The Bern tshirts.

On The Line follows 3 deportees from the United States to Mexico. All have spent decades and decades living in the US, and have nothing in Mexico. They live in Tijuana, close enough to the American border to see San Diego on a clear day.

The heartbreak of this film is of how near, and yet so far, they are from their home. The deportees have not integrated into Mexican life, they don’t want to. They spend every moment thinking about and working towards getting home to the US. Although they can all speak Spanish, they speak English in their homes. They listen to San Diego FM on the radio, watch the news on CNN on the tv, and they work in call centres phoning American businesses and homes to sell products for American companies, just at a fraction of the wage they would get in the US.

Ricardo is a veteran. Which just blows my mind. They don’t need to you to have papers to sign up and die for your country, but you do if you want to come back home and get a piece of the good life you fought to protect. Fucking wild. Americans, and especially the Republicans, are so ‘Support the troops!’ and ‘the military is sacred!”, especially when it comes to discussing the point of a war or challenging budget expenditure, but they are deporting veterans?

Ricardo still holds services for the fallen along with other deported veterans, standing to attention and reporting rank. He works online, spending all day speaking to other Americans going about their day, and when he finishes he watches American tv. He keeps himself in this bubble of America. And it all seems so real, he can watch what they watch, see the weather forecast, listen to the same music. It is so close to home. And yet it’s not. He lives in this island in his flat, full of unpacked boxes, and ignores all of Mexico outside his door.

Sergio also works in a call centre. He is saving up whatever he can to find some way back to his wife, his kids. His whole life is in American and it is like he has been picked up and dropped off in a foreign land. He was brought to America at the age of 1 by his parents. He has never known anything other than America. He is painfully aware that he is living in exile, while his kids grow up without him, while his wife has to find a way to raise their family alone.

Rocio is a grandma whose son serves in the America military. Her boy is off fighting for his country while Mum is being deported to live in a broken-down shack without running water, all alone. Again, everything seems so close. She can facetime her daughters and speak to her grandkids. She can open her home security app on her phone and see the house she left behind, watch her elderly mother cooking meals. But she can never eat the meals, or hug her grandkids. Her daughters are eventually able to come and visit her, and they are struck dumb at their mother living in this crumbling one-room building.

Throughout all of this, despair runs like a torrent. And a barely suppressed rage at the injustice of it. Ricardo had a criminal record as a result of the heroin addiction he developed serving in Vietnam, but has been clean for decades. It is when he is clean and approaching retirement, that’s when they deport him. Sergio also had drug offences from when he was a teenager. But they deport him once he has turned his life around and is a hard-working family man. He even had papers, but they had been lost at one point. And Rocio, she had no criminal record at all. She worked almost half a century in America, put her kids through uni, sent her son off to war, and then they deported her.

It’s all so arbitrary, and so stupid, and so needless. That is what is so disgusting. The destruction of their lives, the tearing apart of their family, leaving them to die alone in a foreign land in a state of poverty – it’s not for any reason. No one believes Rocio, a grandmother and family pillar, is some cartel mafioso. No one believes Sergio poses a danger to society, with his business and kids. No one thinks Ricardo, a Vietnam vet, is a people-trafficker. It’s obvious, and everyone sees it for what it is – ethnically cleansing the USA of as many Latinos as possible.

The bitterness and resentment towards the US this will drive into the hearts of people will last for generations. The sense of insecurity – of Rocio’s grandkids watching their grandmother snatched away after a half-hour hearing – is going to leave ripples that will stretch out beyond sight. This is a trauma that is going to have, and is already having, long-lasting consequences.

The Ants and the Grasshopper focuses on two women, Anita and Esther. Anita is a Malawian farmer and a community activist. Esther is Anita’s friend, mentor and a nurse. Both are active in Bwabwa. They run a women’s local network, focusing on tackling gender inequality, improving children’s health, and ensuring food stability.

Anita is one of those people who you are in awe of. The strength of her spirit touches everyone she meets. The first act of the film focuses on her and her life in Bwabwa. Her story reminds me of The Color Purple, because it is not only a story about triumph over adversity, but a triumph of her spirit. Anita’s father had two wives and favoured one over the other, so her mother and her often went hungry. Anita wanted to be a nun, was devout and studied the Bible to achieve her goal. But at a friend’s wedding, a man decided her would have her as his wife, so he got a group of 15 of his friends to kidnap, beat and imprison her, until she agreed to the marriage. Since she would have been considered “spoiled”, ie. raped, because she had been gone from home alone with the man over many nights, Anita felt she had no option but to proceed with the marriage than bring shame upon her mother and family. As traumatic as the violence was, what was worse was that it forever derailed her life’s plan of being a nun.

But here’s where you see what kind of spirit Anita has. Because when we meet her, her husband works in the field with her, washes clothes, and cooks. He speaks so highly of her, of how she changed his mind about men and women’s work, and how he has learned so much from her. He says he regrets how he married her, and will not let his sons get married in such a way. He understands now it was wrong.

Her husband’s mate Winston, who participated in her abduction, is now their next-door-neighbour. Every other day, Anita visit’s his wife and gets on at him for not helping her out. She has not been cowed by him, it is him who is cowed by her. He talks boldly to the camera about how ludicrous it is for men to do women’s work, bah! But when Anita is speaking to him, he just lets her talk and looks at the ground.

Anita’s my hero.

Esther – who studied to become a nurse right here in Scotland! – is the community nurse who helped Anita overcome her first child’s malnutrition, opening up her horizons to so much knowledge, and who helped change how she farmed, how she thought about the world, and how she lived. Together they are trying to find new ways to deal with the biggest threat facing their community – climate change. The nearby river has completely dried up, it has become a snake of sand through the landscape. Water must be dug for, and even then is but a puddle. The rains and seasons which had been so predictable, are now giving way to successive droughts and floods. For Esther and Anita, climate change is here.

The filmmakers note what passionate and moving speakers Esther and Anita are, and ask them if they would like to come to America to let people know how climate change is effecting their community. What follows is almost like a missionary, Esther and Anita are both devout, and see this a calling to spread the word to stop the destruction over the earth which it is our responsibility to protect.

Weirdly, the people in America least convinced about climate change are the farmers. I’ve always found stuff like this difficult to wrap my head around, like farmers not believing in evolution, it’s like, mate, you actually practice selective breeding, you are literally doing it! You’d think farmers would be the first to see the evidence of climate change, it should be city-dwellers like me, who think food comes wrapped in plastic and couldn’t tell you which direction the sun rises in, that should be denying climate change.

The first folk they meet are from Iowa. The differences between Anita and them are so slight. They are both devout Christians. They are both farmers. They both struggle with constantly being in debt. They both have families and kids they are trying to give a better life. And yet, when the subject of climate change comes up, the conversation falls to immediate awkward halt. The American farmers, even the organic farmers, don’t concede the existence of climate change, chalking it up to cyclical change or God’s will. You can see the frustration on Anita’s face as she tries to convey that this is happening *right now*, this is the reason children in her community go hungry *right now*, this is a reality.

Privately Esther and Anita console each other that seeds that are planted take time to grow, and you can never know what impact you might be having on another.

Unexpectedly, Anita finds more hope in the cities than the countryside. The inner city projects run by Black communities and people of colour – primarily women of colour – are much more realistic about climate change. As they’re told in Oakland, in urban Black communities, this was where all the polluting industries were based, because white and prosperous neighbourhoods didn’t want them in their backyards. So despite a lack of cultivatable land, these city communities were well aware of how industry was impacting the environment. In fact, the colour line is quite visible among Americans who are and are not in denial about climate change. From community kitchens inspired by the Black Panthers, to neighbourhood cultivation of the Detroit urban prairie, consciousness of climate change was at the forefront where the growers were Black.

What’s interesting about this film is how many issues it pings off, despite being ostensibly about climate change. This film is as much about gender, about race, about the effects of slavery and colonialism that are still being felt, about health, about exploitation, about capitalism, about food and the food industry.

It touches upon how a lot of different problems with the food industry has led to it being attacked on many different fronts, without it really changing. For example, the organic farmers see the need to remove pesticides from the ecosystem, but are still part of this bulk exploit and export cycle which perpetuates the notion of food as a commodity, a product, as opposed to the thing you need to live. It is still very much about growing for profit within a capitalist system. At one point Anita also points out that the grain that is being grown on these thousand-acre farms are all going to feed livestock, whereas this would be considered food that could be feeding people in Malawi. Despite Anita not being a vegetarian, the global industrial production of meat is obvious in its impact on food availability.

The film finishes with a coda that takes place two years after the rest of the film, revisiting some of the people Anita met. Some have not changed their minds, but some have. They are more conscious of their practices, even if they are struggling with how to put that into practice, they are actively trying to find a way. And back home Winston has begun learning to cook. He even teaches classes alongside Anita.

How do things change? One person at a time.

The Last Forest is a documentary showing the Yanomami people and their home, the forest of Brazil. It is co-written and stars Davi, a Yanomami leader and activist. It takes place almost entirely in the forest, showing the daily life of the people there. There are some staged scenes, where their origin story is acted out, and where a hunter is carried off by an evil forest spirit. But most documentaries will have staged scenes, they just won’t telegraph them as clearly.

Davi speaks out to his people about the illegal mining encroaching on Yanomami land. He describes living through the 1986 invasion which killed almost 2000 indigenous people. He tells them of the human and environmental calamity that follows mining.

The folk are in agreement but, much like here, there can be difficulty envisioning such vast and permanent change. Especially when life among the Yanomami is so peaceful. People go about their day, making bread, weaving baskets, feeding weans, watching the dug scratch itself. Living in the forest, as far as they are concerned, is living in luxury. Everything you could ever need, stretching for miles in every direction. And the idea that someone would destroy the systems that sustain human life, seems an impossible feat, a ludicrous and mad suicidal endeavour.

When prospectors show up, the Yanomami put on their camoflague paint, take up arms, and chase them from their lands. “You won’t mine here, we won’t let you!” shouts Davi. But the natural curiosity of a world beyond their own, so different, can prove a temptation to some young men. The fear is that it will be too late before they realise how they will be used in that other world, how they will be leveraged against their own people and home.

The Last Forest shows the world of climate crisis activism from the perspective of the Yanomami. Their way of life has lasted 1000 years, and they are entering crucial years where they will have to fight if they want it to continue.

At the end of the film, Davi steps off the mountain and speaks to a lecture hall full of people at Harvard about the book he has written about Yanomami life and how it is being impacted by the corporate violence driving climate change. And it’s like it’s our world that seems weird. After the cool, canopied safety of the singing, living forest, stepping into a bristling concrete city full of screaming sirens feels alien. The ability to carry the reality of one world to the other is a challenge which is enormous but vital.

Sky Aelans is a short film about the untouched forests of the Solomon Islands and the people who live there. It is beautifully shot and filled with evocative sound. It makes a plea to protect these unspoiled areas.