This absorbing but selective documentary is worth seeing for its personal stories and the friction between UK climate activists. Maia Kenworthy and Elena Sánchez Bellot are less persuasive when those encounters have to explain the movement.
Rebellion is an engaging, frustrating documentary, worth an evening for anyone interested in the practical difficulties of climate activism. Directors Maia Kenworthy and Elena Sánchez Bellot get close to UK campaigners and find plenty of friction within a shared cause. They make the individuals interesting enough to sustain our attention across 92 minutes. The difficulty is knowing how much of the movement we are seeing, and how much depends on the people the film has chosen to follow.
Direct action gives the film something visible to follow, a useful starting point for a subject that can easily become a sequence of opinions. The personal accounts give us a reason to stay with it. Maia Kenworthy and Elena Sánchez Bellot resist the temptation to make agreement with the activists a condition of finding them interesting. The close footage allows their disagreements to become part of our understanding of them. We get a sense of how demanding it is to keep acting alongside other people.
We found the bickering wearing, precisely because the personal stories had already given us reasons to care about these campaigners. Those disputes make the task of working together look exhausting, and the film is right to give them space. A tidier account would be easier company but less useful to anyone wondering what participation actually involves. The difficulty is that an argument can hold our attention without helping us understand much. At times the film relies too heavily on the fact that people are disagreeing.
The directors’ closeness to their subjects is valuable, especially when it prevents the activists from becoming anonymous representatives of a cause. That access also gives the selection of participants particular importance. Significant figures are absent, leaving a partial account that the intimate footage cannot fill out on its own. We need more help understanding how representative these people and their disputes are. Without it, the emphasis on internal friction risks giving the most watchable material more weight than it should carry.
A campaigning documentary does not have to provide an opposing speaker every time an activist makes a point. It can choose its company and concentrate on what that company reveals. Once the disagreements become central, though, the film needs to establish enough of the wider picture for us to judge them. Here the personal material is more persuasive than the account of the movement. The problem lies in how the encounters have been selected and presented, not in the decision to take the campaigners seriously.
There is enough here to reward viewers interested in the people behind direct action, with a clear caveat about its scope. Its willingness to include awkwardness gives the participants more life than a purely approving portrait would. The individual stories survive the frustration of the disputes, and they are the reason we would recommend it to the curious. For a broader understanding of UK climate activism, leave room for another account.
