Credit photos: Martin Wilhelm (with the permission of Thomas Lacoste)
With “Soul Uprisings,” Thomas Lacoste has created a documentary that captures the power of an ecological movement as well as its existence. The film is based on deeply personal testimonies, often moving, and on a choice of staging that rejects didacticism in favor of focusing on words, actions, and landscapes.
At the Bel-Air cinema on Friday, April 3, in a full house, the director defended this approach clearly: he did not want to make a journalistic or militant film in the traditional sense, but a cinematic film capable of creating a sensitive encounter.
“We are not at all in a journalistic, didactic, or educational film… we are in a film that relies on the strengths of cinema and particularly its sensitive strengths,” he explained.
This formal ambition gives the film a true uniqueness. Lacoste emphasizes a “deeply egalitarian aesthetics” that should “redistribute the roles and parts of each and everyone” and that rejects militant recitations that he considers “purely deadly” in cinema. The result is a highly intimate choral portrait where voices do not just comment on a struggle, but make it tangible in its contradictions, joys, and human depth.
A movement incarnate
The director extensively recounted the genesis of the film, born according to him in the spring of 2023, in a moment of brutal criminalization of the movement. He said he was struck by the violence of the state, but also by the collective intelligence of the Earth’s Uprisings.
“It is in this spring of 2023 that the project takes its source,” he recalled, adding that he wanted to respond to a situation where activists were being labeled “eco-terrorists” even though they were defending common resources, the land, and water.
His narrative also clarifies the film’s method: first establishing a “trust register,” then building interviews in a logic of maieutics, allowing life trajectories, know-how, and connections to the territory to emerge.
Lacoste wanted to show “how these people inhabit their territory, inhabit their know-how, share them in the heart of the movement.” He emphasizes a point that runs through the entire debate: “There is already a form of resistance, concrete resistance, organized resistance, lived resistance.”
The joy as a political force
One of the strongest contributions of the debate was the way Lacoste articulated ecological struggle with joy and subsistence. He described what he calls a “subsistence policy,” made up of pantries, canteens, self-construction, mutualization, care, and material support, capable of providing “over 100,000 meals” to support mobilizations.
For him, this discreet yet essential infrastructure is not peripheral: it is at the very heart of the movement’s political power. “There are 10,000 ways to enter this,” he says.
In the film as in the debate, the filmmaker connects this dimension to a simple yet powerful idea: not to be “out of touch.” He recounts being struck by the words of an activist who reminded him never to lose the connection with the territory, the gestures, the animals, the soils, and other forms of life.
He also mentioned, with emotion, the memory of Lucie Aubrac and the idea that subsistence had been an “unthinkable” for the National Council of the Resistance, allowing him to link the Earth’s Uprisings to a broader historical continuity of resistance.
A film of “cinema”
The most interesting point of the exchange, perhaps, is the way Thomas Lacoste refuses to separate cinema and politics. He emphasizes that his films are not narrowly activist films: “My films are not at all militant films. Not at all. They are films that rely on the pure powers of cinema,” he says. This statement summarizes the success of “Soul Uprisings”: not just explaining, but making one feel; not imposing a discourse, but creating openness to the world.
The film finds its strength in this paradox: it is both a tool for struggle and a cinematic work, an object of protection and a sensitive proposal. This is what makes it valuable.
