“Uprisings”, by Thomas Lacoste
Who will go see Uprisings will think they know what they are coming to witness: a film which documents and supports the actions of the Earth Uprisings, a movement coordinating a multitude of actions at the intersection of ecology and social justice. And the tenth feature film by French filmmaker Thomas Lacoste is indeed that. But not only that.
The film includes images of the actions of the organization that a former Minister of the Interior wanted to ban, some toured for the occasion, some pre-existing photos or videos put in black and white to emphasize their archive status, with a visual treatment which also evokes the engravings which once accompanied adventure novels.
In multiple environments all over France, these images document the achievements of collectives claiming to be part of the Earth Uprisings and which are part of the struggles, in the same way as the more conflictual moments, which are also remembered. In this, Uprisings joins the cohort of productions around similar themes, productions not always distributed in theaters, even if cinemas are also places favoring collective discussions at the end of the screenings.
Thomas Lacoste’s film was shown more than a hundred times in theaters before the national release this Wednesday, February 11, with screenings always followed by exchanges between its spectators, the director and people involved in the situations mentioned. Uprisings is an exemplary part of these processes, still ongoing.
Before him, many other audiovisual objects have accompanied sometimes very specific subjects (on water, forest, green algae, etc. to mention only environmental issues), including sometimes with an authentic search for cinematographic writing, like the recent Red Forest by Laurie Lassalle, produced at the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
But the singular contribution of Uprisings is due to the central role played by another device mobilized by the film, apparently the simplest, even the least cinematographic, that there is: interviews, in front of the camera, with the people involved. There are thirteen speeches, from one or sometimes two people acting together and telling the story.
On television, we talk about talking heads to designate this device. What happens in the case of this film is the exact opposite. The framing, the duration, the beauty of the images, the quality of the statements, the sensitive diversity of the people, the attention to their affects as much as to their ideas and to their practices generate a very singular effect, mysteriously graceful at the same time as loaded with meaning.
Everyone not only shares a point of view and information; it becomes the bearer of an emotion, of a relationship with the world. He or she is both a person (with experiences, practices, an experience of struggle) and a character (the incarnation of a story). Example among many others: the finesse of a naturalist’s evocation of the collective listening of a European nightjar by a hundred people gathered in the Normandy countryside transforms a tiny fact into an excellent summary of possible movements, with multiple promises.
As rare as it is powerful when activated, this capacity of cinema to “make a world” from the sole words uttered and the presence of the person speaking is a fertile mystery, which gives access to much more than what is actually stated.
It is in this apparently minimalist exercise of the filmed interview that we can most clearly see the extent to which the author was identified in particular thanks to The Democratic Hypothesis (2022) is not only a committed director, but a filmmaker in his own right. This sense of cinema, vivid in the sequences of words facing the camera, is found, differently, in the overall composition.
The arrangement of the interventions of this breeder, this mountain guide and his daughter, this farmer, this lawyer, this manufacturer of agricultural machinery, this veteran of peasant unionism and his son, but also the way in which these cows, these fields, these birds, these mountains are filmed, together tell the story of what we cannot call other than a political landscape.
This landscape exists de facto, including because of the deliberate excesses of the repression against the Earth Uprisings, which are not blunders but the strategy of a State intimately associated with agro-industrial lobbies and seeking to flatter the security impulses manipulated by the extreme right.
But this “landscape” is the work of cinema which makes it sensitive and understandable in its multiple dimensions: technical, economic, emotional, political, scientific. The arrangement of the sequences invents a dynamic form, carrying more than what each one conceals. So, even if many of the situations mentioned are dark, worrying, depressing or brutal, it emanates from Uprisings
a joyful calm and a lucid energy which are perhaps the best contribution of the film as a whole.
“The Travels of Tereza”, by Gabriel Mascaro
Discovered at the Berlinale 2025 (under the international title The Blue Trail), the fourth feature film by Brazilian Gabriel Mascaro, revealed in 2015 with the magnificent Ventos de Agostoopens as a barely unrealistic dystopia, where elderly people are sent to gated communities in the name of economic rationality.
One of the many beauties of Tereza’s Travels will be to turn around like a glove this dark romantic argument, a fiction which could have remained locked, in the sole project of denunciation as the existence of its characters is locked by the laws of a totalitarian state.
But very quickly Denise Weinberg gives a presence that is both vigorous and playful to this granny embarked on a series of encounters where the realism of life along the Amazon River and the phantasmagorical possibilities opened up by various practices and substances find impressive visual translations of beauty.
With the reinforcement of a boatman in love and a river and digital preacher, a snail with strange secretions and fighting fish, but above all the plastic inventiveness of the director, the septuagenarian Tereza travels a truly liberating path, thanks to the formal and narrative exuberance of the film as much as to what she encounters, confronts or dodges throughout her astonishing odyssey.
