TIFF miracle How to blow up a pipeline brings elements of a robbery thriller to a drama about a group of young environmental activists trying to stop the construction of an oil pipeline in west Texas.
The younger, predominantTly Gen-Z Cast consists of The White Lotus’ Luke Gauge, as well as Kristine Froseth, Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane, Jayme Lawson, Marcus Scribner, and Jake Weary. As the group works together to carry out their dangerous and illegal plan, they must avoid causing further environmental damage in the process.
The film by Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Goldhaber and Daniel Garber is based on Andreas Malm’s Nonfiction 2020 with the same title, in which the climate scientist challenges the entrenched pacifist approach to environmental protection and affirms the need for escalation tactics (violence and destruction of property) in the face of corporate greed. It’s a manifesto for blowing up oil pipelines. It’s a radical look at activism that resists climate fatalism and advocates more intensive measures in the face of ecological collapse.
Barer, who also plays How to blow up a pipelineShe says the book came into her life at the right time.
“We’ve all been dissatisfied with the world in our lives, to varying degrees, and we felt incredibly powerless and only you know how we can affect the world. And this book kind of fell into our laps,” says Barer IndieWire. “We were all kind of obsessed with it. It was so simply invigorating. It felt like it had set us on fire again.”
She adds: “Our world views were shaped by very different epochs. And that was an important dialogue that we had when we wrote it.”
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Chatting with collidersexplains Goldhaber:
“The film is based on a manifesto by climate activist Andreas Malm, who basically writes about how every single social justice movement in history is based on at least property destruction and that climate change is an existential threat to human life on Earth and in a way questions whether destroying property is necessary to move away from fossil fuels and sustain human civilization and society as we know it, and so we’ve adapted those ideas. The book has no story. It’s just a kind of political theory. We essentially turned those ideas into a heist thriller about young climate activists who blow up an oil pipeline in rural Texas. The film walks you through how they build the bombs and how they do it in quite some detail, and in a sort of classic heist fashion, they have a very complex and exciting plan.”
How to blow up a pipeline hits theaters on April 7th.
