Join us for an afternoon of film to help raise funds for the Earth First! Summer Gathering.

We will kick the event off with a brief introduction to Earth First! and some information about the Summer Gathering which will take place in the North East this year.

Then onto:

BRAND (FIRE) III Resistance within riches
120 min

In November 2012, an activist holed up in a complex tunnel system in the Hambach Forest, ending the silence about the deforestation of this once gigantic forest area between the cities of Cologne, Düsseldorf and Aachen. The energy company RWE has been felling this ancient forest since 1972, but the occupation has spread awareness of the clear-cutting far beyond the local boundaries. Today only 10% of this forest remains. Activists from different groups had taken on the task of making the Rheinische brown coal (lignite) area to a crystallisation point for the struggle against coal power generation. Five years later, between summer and autumn 2017, more than 10,000 people took part in protest actions around the mines.

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.