25.06.2026
Existential eco threat
London’s Raindance is the largest independent film festival in the UK. Launched in 1993, its 34th festival featured 197 films from around the world, including many by first-time film makers. Jim Moody looks at three which highlight the ecological impact of capitalism
Gaslit
Writer, director and producer: Katie Camosy - USA 2025; 111 minutes
Gaslit accompanies Jane Fonda as she travels across the oilfields of the Permian Basin of west Texas and along the Louisiana coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Not a pretty tale: by no means your usual travelogue. Fonda is a veteran activist - from opposition to the USA’s war on Vietnam to climate protest, which saw her spend her 82nd birthday in jail.
Those impacted by oil and gas production relate decades-long tales of woe. With capitalism’s fossil fuel production having boomed in the US, the lives of everyday people living near its operations have suffered immense harm. There has, too, been environmental degradation. Local activists - who have been beavering away for years, sometimes decades - are foregrounded in the film.
In the last 10 years, thousands of new wells have opened up in the Permian Basin, producing a ‘Mad Max’ landscape. And all this to transform the USA into the largest oil producer in the world. Fracking in particular is problematic, venting methane (CH4) gas from its operations; but towers where it is supposed to be ‘flared’ (ie, burnt, producing carbon dioxide, CO2) often just release methane into the atmosphere, where it accelerates climate change to greater effect than CO2. The founder of Oilfield Witness, Sharon Wilson, and her self-styled ‘methane hunters’ have exposed the lies of fossil fuel extractors, with unassailable video evidence over lengthy periods of methane gas releases into the atmosphere. Regulators are notable by their absence. Texas has thus become the No1 polluter by greenhouse gases (viz, methane) in the world (“not China”, notes Sharon).
Liquefied natural gas (LNG), plastics and petrochemical production infest local communities, especially where these industries’ plants can take over areas cheaply. Often that means turfing out long-term residents or constructing slap-bang next to those unable to leave. Many of the areas along the Mississippi river have been occupied for 60 or more years by the majority black population, with traditionally little political heft. Gaslit illuminates such profitable casual racism and there are many emotional scenes, as a litany of depredations and deaths (especially by cancers) caused by emissions from nearby petrochemical plants is recited. The worst area is now called ‘Cancer Alley’.
The USA is the world’s largest exporter of LNG, much of which comes to Europe under threat of Trump’s ‘take it or be sanctioned’ business gangster methodology. Local residents have journeyed to Germany, as we see, to expose the deceit of European governments in banning fracking on their soil, but importing its products, especially LNG, from the US to the detriment of those living right next to these polluters.
The issue with tissue: a boreal love story
Writer, producer and director: Michael Zelniker - Canada 2026; 107 minutes
Wryly grabbing the viewer’s attention in a faux ad for toilet paper, this documentary has a very serious message: ‘Save Canada’s boreal, thus saving the world and its population’. Canada’s boreal is the climatic zone south of the Arctic - especially the cold, temperate region dominated by taiga and forests of birch, poplar and conifers; it is a northern biotic area running from the Pacific to the Atlantic, inhabited by indigenous first nations. In area it is equivalent to 13 Californias.
The main bone of contention is that this ‘lung of the planet’ of ‘old-growth’ trees and other vegetation is under threat from unfettered felling on an industrial scale that beggars belief. Clear cutting (complete removal, many square miles at a time) of virgin forest goes on apace. This boreal contains 80% of the diversity, 80% of the carbon store and 25% of the wetlands of the whole world. In terms of peoples, 600 indigenous communities live in the boreal. Its rate of sequestering carbon is more than all other areas of the world combined; hundreds of species make up its habitat.
Rapacious capitalism (is there any other kind?) has been encroaching. Currently, 80% of felling in Canada is in previously untouched forests at a rate of 95 trees every second (or three billion annually), mainly for packaging. Surveys show that 14% of felled areas fail to grow back decades later.
First-nation elders, boreal science specialists and activists alike are aghast at the enormity of what is befalling the ecosystem and what it means for them in Canada - and, indeed, the rest of the world - when such a resource is under threat. This is not just nibbling at the edges: the fauna and flora are being depleted, bordering unsustainability already. The fact that herds of up to 800,000 caribou have fallen in a few years to tens of thousands is a distinct marker toward extinction; all caribou herds are now officially considered ‘threatened’. And it is down to logging. No provinces of Canada have countered the threat: they prefer oil exploitation; meanwhile, the federal government fails to act on the existential threat to habitat. In fact, Ontario has accelerated logging.
Canada’s populist politicians spout about protecting jobs rather than developing schemes to protect caribou - deliberately failing to accept that the caribou are a marker species for severe degradation of this boreal environment. And this in the face of a 99% decrease in caribou in some areas - attesting real boreal distress.
Indigenous speakers condemn what they see as 200 years of settler colonialism, dumping their communities in reserves some refer to as ‘concentration camps’. Colonial scum like Duncan Campbell Scott instituted measures to destroy indigenous culture and life, which he labelled “a final solution to our Indian problem”. All done with intent by the state. Children have been taken away from parents to ‘educate’ them out of their culture; rape and murder in their institutions was commonplace: at Kamloops, over 200 bodies of small children were found in the grounds of a residential school. ‘Bitter’ does not begin to describe the feelings now of those who have experienced the spoliation of people and place, some of whom speak on camera. As they say, it was all done to steal resources and land, or for a pipeline: “the forest sublet to big corporations”. Currently, only 0.2% of land is available for indigenous communities.
The issue with tissue emphasises the necessity of the involvement of the indigenous people in protecting the Canadian boreal - which, while important, suggests it is mostly their fight. It is clear that such environmental issues, as examined in this film, do impact immediately and directly upon those physically closest to them, which is why what they have to say is rightly utilised to add power to the argument. However, another thread that runs through the film must be borne in mind and needs emphasising: this boreal is a lung of the world, for mammalian life, including human life, is pretty obviously unsustainable without enough photosynthesis.
The mechanism by which humanity pulls together on this question of the spoliation and destruction of our shared habitat is, of course, wholly and deeply political. No solution is likely to ‘emerge’ magically, or even if a majority is simply like-minded. No, political organisation through unity based on the working class majority and, of course, a communist party worthy of the name is our way out of this horror story of late capitalism. ‘Socialism or barbarism’ never sounded better.
In the path of giants
Directors/producers: Kirsty Wells and Fayed Khan; production companies: Black Leaf Films, Channel News Asia, Singapore, Bangladesh 2026; 89 minutes
If anything suggests the strong link between human actions and environmental degradation, conflicts between states and peoples is up there amongst the prime causes. This documentary presents the facts, as its makers have seen them on the ground in and around the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong, in Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh. As of 2017, pogroms against the Muslim Rohingya over the nearby border in Burma/Myanmar became ethnic cleansing, resulting in a mass exodus of Rohingya to Bangladesh. Around 950,000 now live in Kutupalong and satellite camps, with around 8,000 acres of forested area having been mown down as a consequence.
The indigenous group of Buddhist Chakma people are longstanding local forest dwellers, who initially sympathised with the refugees, but are now in dire straits themselves due to the environmental impact of one particular animal: the Asian elephant, whose habitat this forest is. Crucially, the elephants’ ages-old migration pattern has been thwarted, since Kutupalong sits astride the animals’ migration trail into Burma. The elephants cannot find enough food and its young are not thriving, leading to night-time forays onto Chakma farmland.
Kencharam, a Chakma rice farmer in nearby Horikhola, joins other village men in patrolling to scare off marauding elephants with torches and loud noises. Villagers live in constant fear, because elephants not only eat and trample on crops, but also sometimes attack humans and damage houses and outbuildings.
Rohingya in Kutupalong also suffer from the elephant problem, with 14 people killed by elephants since 2017. A UN-associated NGO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), trains Rohingya as conservators on how to expel elephants safely.
But there is no Bangladeshi government help or compensation to be had by the Chakma, whose crops have been destroyed by rampaging elephants, although there is a vague suggestion from a campaigning lawyers’ group here that something positive might happen. However, also on screen, some government officials squash these ideas and have no trouble in labelling the Chakma as ‘land-grabbers’ who have no right to live on Forest Department land anyway. This illustrates the accuracy of Kencharam’s statement that “Chakmas do not get rights like Bengalis”, despite both being officially Bangladesh citizens. Distraught and abandoned, some Chakma are caught on Forest Department cameras harrying elephants at night, only to be condemned outright without trial, not to mention having the department’s goon squads invade and tear down their homes.
Social breakdown in the Rohingya camps is leading to criminal gangs rising, and some refugees are being forced back to Burma to fight the regime there - seemingly as cannon fodder.
Meanwhile, the elephants’ problems have worsened, because the Bangladesh government has erected impenetrable fences to prevent any more Rohingya coming from Burma overland. Talk by some NGO officials of creating an elephants’ artificial migratory route near the old one has been stymied. Bangladesh’s bourgeois bureaucracy has completely failed the indigenous local Chakma people, the dumped Rohingya people and, of course, the environment, not least the elephant population of the forest. No-one and no environment look likely to be protected by the state. And in the last 10 years, the rate of elephant killings in Bangladesh has doubled.
Problems of human-environment interaction only look likely to get worse. At the film’s end a stark estimate is given: “In 2025, as a result of conflict and climate change, the number of forcibly displaced people in the world reached 122 million. This is forecast to rise to 1.2 billion people by 2050.”
Assuming, of course, that capital’s domination of the world continues.
Jim Moody blogs at redryde.wordpress.com