Each year, the International Historical Film Festival in Pessac, in the Bordeaux suburbs, explores a theme in the light of cinema. Documentaries and fiction tell history. “Masculine/Feminine”, “The end of the colonies” or “The 70s” have been the words of previous years. All week this year, the Earth is at the center of the screens. Vast and dramatic subject. From alerts to solutions, from landless farmers to devastated forests, so many angles that film directors tell. Panorama of a selection listening to our Earth.
“The Settlers” by Felipe Gálves Haberle
The opening film of the festival, The settlers by Chilean Felipe Gálves Haberle gives the little-known account of the massacre of the indigenous populations of the Land of Fire. And it remains taboo in the history books of young Chilean students. The year is 1901, it is a desert of stones between the Andes mountain range and the Atlantic Ocean. A desert, but the subsoil is rich in oil. The political project is clear, the white aristocracy seeks to “civilize” these territories. Three horsemen are hired by a rich landowner, José Menendez, to dispossess the indigenous populations of their land. In the form of a slow and contemplative western, this road movie which crosses desolate but majestic landscapes, recounts the tragic expedition concluded by the genocide of the indigenous Selk’nam, called Onas by the whites, in Chile at the beginning of the Twentieth century. In certain regions of the globe, could colonization have been a harbinger of the climate crisis? This is the question that arises when watching the film.
For director Felipe Gálves Haberle, the link is clear. The massacre of the Indians and the plundering of the lands led to the dramatic ecological situation of the region. Originally: the lure of gain. “Tierra del Fuego is a land where the white man found an opportunity for profit, by transforming these expanses into a land of oil and mechanics, by destroying the subsoil, through economic interest. There is a link between human and ecological sacrifice: a hundred years later, we see that everything was plundered from the basement of these lands after the massacre of the first inhabitants. he declares to Franceinfo Culture.
Cinema, whistleblower since 1973
Through the festival’s programming, we discover that the future of this good old land which catches fire was very early in the minds of the screenwriters and directors. For François Aymé, general commissioner of the Festival, filmmakers seized this destiny long before politicians. “I will quote Green Sun (1973) for example that we program, this film is contemporary with the publication of the Rome report, so we notice that the cinema seized upon the first major global alert on this subject.”
With Green Sun, dystopia rhymes with visionary storytelling. On June 26, 1974, the film by Richard Fleischer with Charlton Heston was released on French screens. Green Sun imagine the New York of 2022. Men have exhausted natural resources. On a devastated and overpopulated Earth, they feed on synthetic foods. The city is suffering from the heatwave. Any similarities with today would be purely fortuitous and could only be the result of pure coincidence.
After science fiction, American cinema became a whistleblower in the early 2000s by seizing ecological scandals. “The United States has this capacity to be both the biggest polluters – it’s a shortcut – and to have an alert cinema very early on. Films like Dark Water where the director Todd Haynes timely reminds us that a society (the chemical industry giant DuPont) for decades knew the devastating effects of Teflon having carried out tests on animals and having learned of malformations in the children of women who had been exposed”, reminds us of François Aymé. This is also the case of Erin Brockovich, alone against everyone, presented at the Festival, directed by Steven Soderbergh and released in 2000. Oscar for Julia Roberts, two and a half million spectators in France. A story of solitary combat and struggle against the all-powerful society which is poisoning the drinking water of Hinkley, a remote village in California, and causing an epidemic of cancer.
In France, it would be Coline Serreau
President of the jury of the International Historical Film Festival, Coline Serreau could be, alongside Pierre Jolivet or Cyril Dion (with whom she worked), the pioneering director who addressed in her cinema the themes of climate change and rare solutions provided. In 1996, a curious object was released on French screens, Beautiful green, a funny and utopian tale with Vincent Lindon and Marion Cottillard. It’s a joke. If at the time, the newspaper The new observer talks about an organic film, radical and jubilant, the reception is mixed. The film evokes, before its time, vegetarianism, a polluted, unlivable world, the public and the critics do not seem convinced. Coline Serreau declares in a work published by Actes Sud in 2009: “The film is released. A dismal failure. Nobody likes it, nobody goes to see it, the critics ridicule me, the profession understands nothing about this UFO”.
When we meet her, the anger has not subsided: “I can tell you that Beautiful green was really butchered on purpose by the media because it talked about things that were too annoying. And then, it was the public who came, “beautiful green meetings” were created and finally on the internet, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions of spectators now who watch the film and who understand what it is. there is behind and what is subversive in this film. (…) There is a very beautiful phrase from Brecht which says: ‘What is important is what has become important’.”
A solution cinema
In 2010, the director returned to the front. But this time in documentary mode. Local solutions for global disorder identifies the causes, but above all the good ideas and solutions to the predicted catastrophe. But here again, Coline Serreau does not lose her temper: “Thirteen years ago, we proposed solutions, unfortunately, we have still wasted too much time. I continue to be totally convinced that we can very well repair this Earth, but that we must change everything. We must change our way of eating, our way of consuming (…). It can also be very painful for people. We started it late, we didn’t explain what alter growth was, another growth.” Alongside Coline Serreau, there are many documentarians plowing our improbable future and presenting their films at the festival.
François Aymé underlines this and pays tribute to them. “The documentarians carry out extraordinary in-depth work, with honesty and scientific rigor. Marie-Monique Robin, notably in her recent film The Pandemic Factoryshows the relationship between deforestation and the development of pandemics and she milks it with a number of scientists she met all over the world, that is to say she accomplished a monstrous work of journalistic research and scientist.”
Hope for the forests by François-Xavier Drouet
At the Festival, all the evils of the earth are projected. While deforestation is often talked about, concerns about “malforestation” are rarer. Traveling the roads of France, from the Landes to the Morvan, and marveling at the marvelous French forest, hides an organized rampage. This is what François-Xavier Drouet says in his documentary Forest Time. The images are frightening, filmed like in the cinema, the violence of the destruction is obvious. For 30 years, mechanization has taken power in the forests. These mechanical monsters, filmed at ground level, are the symbols of the rampage. They destroy the soil, crush the stream beds and, in the end, the “clear-cutting” destroys the landscape and ecosystem.
But hope remains. In Slovenia or Switzerland, clear felling is banned and more respectful plantations are put in place, yet productivity does not weaken. And especially in Limousin, a territory that director François-Xavier Drouet knows well, resistance actions exist. He explains to us that “where a single forester proposed irregular high forest, that is to say forest management with a diversity of species and a diversity of ages and working by successive thinnings to maintain a continuous forest cover rather than razing everything every 40 years (editor’s note, the clean cut), now there are ten of them.” Paradoxically, climate change and the dangers of drought and parasites for our forests could save them: “We will have to choose the type of forest that is most resilient to climate change, we will ask ourselves the question of the choice of species. In any case, clear cutting must be banned. A mixed forest from which trees are taken, but only we don’t shave it all at once, it’s obvious that it will be more resistant to climate change and the foresters know that.” concludes François-Xavier Drouet. A seed of hope.
International Historical Film Festival. Cinema Jean Eustache, 7 rue des Poilus, 33600 Pessac
Programming HERE