A film trilogy about the fossil fuel economy, brown coal (lignite), climate policy and the resistance in the Rhineland. By Susanne Fasbender in cooperation with the Hambach Forest Film Collective. Each of the three films stands independent of the others. As a trilogy, they create a new entity; each film awards depth to the others.
BRAND (FIRE) III Resistance within riches, 120 minutes
Long before the forest occupation in the Hambach forest became an at that time still unimaginable attraction, Susanne Fasbender began 2012/13 in cooperation with the Hambach Forest Film Collective with the first work on BRAND III. People who took a radical step by occupying the Hambach forest, without any reassurance of civil society acceptance or even recognition, have their say here. Thus the film becomes a rare document beyond the hashtag “Hambi bleibt”.
In Brand III, Susanne Fasbender looks back at the first Climate Camps in the Rheinland, visits citizens taking action against the threat to good health caused by power generation from lignite, and tells the story of the forest occupation in the Hambach Forest until its eviction in 2018. In co-operation with the Hambach Forest Film Collective, she followed some of the many key events of the resistance, not only to document these individual transgressions, but also to give them a space where the underlying concepts are explained and where personal thoughts can be expressed. Activists speak about tactics and motivation, and about their experience of living in the forest and at the same time, through their struggle for a future worth living for, being exposed to anti-ecological repression mechanisms. “The eviction is not the end”. That’s how the movie ends.