Rebellion

What I did quite appreciate from this documentary is that is captured the activities of the activists of the "Extinction Rebellion" without it looking as if they were all well rehearsed. Now that's not to say that these people are media virgins, for that they certainly are not, but their comfort in front of the lens does enable us to stop worrying about them being produced and coaxed and thence to watch and listen more objectively to just how this campaign of civil disobedience was conceived, born and operated by a group of, initially at any rate, like-minded protesters. These people had increasingly felt that the more traditional methods of getting their views across had failed and that direct action was the only solution. Using some publicly available archive of their subsequent actions as well as some especially shot material and some lively discussion, this presents us with quite a vibrant look at how passions played out, but it's not really a documentary. I felt it much more a propaganda piece populated by opinionates whose view of their own views - even if you tended to agree - had an arrogance to it that might well have proved counterproductive with an uninitiated or unsympathetic audience for an organisation that unashamedly flicks the "V" at the rule of law, or takes it into it's own hands. It also doesn't try to journalistically balance their perspective with those of whom they describe as the "establishment" and I'm afraid that after about an hour I felt it was more of a rant of dissatisfaction from a fairly predictable and fertile section of the community whose agenda is as much driven by their own need to attain attention as it is to make any practical and scaleable political points. As a piece of film-making, this is well put together though and director Maia Kenworthy has taken some risks mixing up her production so as to avoid this just becoming a moralist lecture, and it's provocative and worth a look.